How to Use the Branch Prediction Championship Kit

1. Download the simulation infrastructure: http://hpca23.cse.tamu.edu/cbp2016/cbp2016.final.tar.gz

2. Download the training traces : http://hpca23.cse.tamu.edu/cbp2016/trainingTraces.Final.tar

3. Download the evaluation traces : http://hpca23.cse.tamu.edu/cbp2016/evaluationTraces.Final.tar

4. Download the simulation results from the 2016 competition : http://hpca23.cse.tamu.edu/cbp2016/cbp2016_evaluation_results.tar.gz

5. MD5SUM for all of the above : http://hpca23.cse.tamu.edu/cbp2016/MD5SUM.txt

Setting Up the Simulation Infrastructure:

6. Unpack the kit:

tar -xzvf cbp2016.tar.gz

cd cbp2016

7. There should be five directories: sim, scripts, traces, bin, and results

8. You will need to install the BOOST library and add a link to the library to the Makefile in the sim directory. See comments in the Makefile.

9. The sim directory contains the simulator.

         cd sim
	 make clean; make

10. The scripts directory contains scripts that can help you run your predictor for all 223 traces. Check out the doit.sh file in the scripts directory.

	cd ../scripts
	./doit.sh

11. 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*

8. The traces directory contains 5 of the smaller traces (~100 million instructions) for initial testing purposes. You will need to download all 223 traces from the www.velocity.ncsu.edu/cbp2016 cabinet and copy them to the traces directory. You will receive a download link to the files after you subscribe to the cbp_2016 google group.

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.

Last Modified Wed Jan 27th 7:52 PM by JD