How to Use the Branch Prediction Championship Kit

Setting Up the Simulation Infrastructure:

1. Subscribe to the Google group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cbp_2014

2. Download the CBP kit:  cbp2014.ver3.tar.gz (900MB, last update: 1 am EST 3/12)  and save it in your home directory. 

(Changes in Ver3: In Ver2, the SHORT traces did not contain any unconditional branches.  Ver 3 fixes this problem.  If you already have Ver2, you may simply copy traces/SHORT* from Ver3 into your current Ver2 traces/ directory.  This update does not affect any other sub directories, so, if you like,  you can retain your current sim, scripts, and results directories). 

3. unpack the kit: 

 	tar -xzvf cbp2014.ver3.tar.gz
  	cd cbp2014

4. There should be four directories: sim, scripts, traces, and results

5. The sim directory contains the simulator.  

         cd sim
	 make
         ./predictor ../traces/SHORT-INT-1.cbp4.gz

6. The scripts directory contains scripts that can help you run your predictor for all 40 traces.  Check out the doit.sh file in the scripts directory.

	cd ../scripts
	./doit.sh

7. We will use the AMEAN over all traces as the figure of merit.  You can compute this using the getdata.pl script.  Usage is as follows.

	./getdata.pl -d ../results/GSHARE* 

Writing Your Own Branch Predictior:

In your sim directory, there are two files you can modify: predictor.cc and predictor.h 

Only these two files should be submitted with your contest submission. Any changes you make to any other files will not be reflected in our simulator.