ByteLabs

Our paper about Cycle-Accurate Performance Modelling in an Ultra-Fast Just-In-Time Dynamic Binary Translation Instruction Set Simulator got accepted for SAMOS 2010.

Here is the abstract:

“Instruction set simulators (ISS) are vital tools for compiler and processor architecture design space exploration and verification. State-of-the-art simulators using just-in-time (JIT) dynamic binary translation (DBT) techniques are able to simulate complex embedded processors at speeds above 500 MIPS. However, these functional ISS do not provide microarchitectural observability. In contrast, low-level cycle-accurate ISS are too slow to simulate full-scale applications, forcing developers to revert to FPGA-based simulations. In this paper we demonstrate that it is possible to run ultra-high speed cycle-accurate instruction set simulations surpassing FPGA-based simulation speeds. We extend the JIT DBT engine of our ISS and augment JIT generated code with a verified cycle-accurate processor model. Our approach can model any microarchitectural configuration, does not rely on prior profiling, instrumentation, or compilation, and works for all binaries targeting a state-of-the-art embedded processor implementing the ARCompact™ instruction set architecture (ISA). We achieve simulation speeds up to 63 MIPS on a standard x86 desktop computer, whilst the average cycle-count deviation is less than 1.5 % for the industry standard EEMBC and CoreMark benchmark suites.“

We came up with another interesting project that might be of interest to you! The full title of this project is “A LLVM Backend for a Just-In-Time Compilation Engine of a state-of-the-art Instruction Set Simulator” and a detailed project specification can be found here.

If you are interested you can either contact me, Björn or Nigel.

The School of Informatics in Edinburgh was hosting this years SICSA DEMOfest'09 where our PASTA research group presented the latest developments sourrounding the next generation EnCore Embedded Microprocessor codenamed Castle.

• More information about DEMOfest'09 event.
• More information about the PASTA Research Group.

As of today the PASTA project has issued an official press release about our new EnCore microprocessor.

Press Release: Gadgets could go greener with high-speed computer chip

I have just finished the facelift of our CArD – Compiler and Architecture Design Group website. The people page gives a good overview about our members and we finally have a news section as well.

From today on we have a wikipedia page for the EnCore processor.

Also if you search for ‘pasta project’ on video.google.com we are one of the top hits. We also do very well on traditional search engines like google, yahoo, and bing – searching for ‘pasta project’ reveals us at the very top most of the time.

I have been working on a video that portrays what our PASTA research group does. Have fun watching it and remember that none of us are professional camera men, actors, or video editors - so it is a bit shaky but hopefully still informative and fun.

This has bugged me for a while when useing TextMates ‘Filter Through Command…’ to replace all newlines in a selection. Somehow my mind always wants to use sed to do this although there are simpler ways to do it.

The following works with GNU sed but not with BSD sed on my Mac (although it should work given the documentation in the man page):

sed -n ':a;N;$!ba;s/\n//g;p' < infile

What this does is the following:

• :a put label at the first position
• N Append the next line of input to the pattern space
• $!ba branch to label a, the ! tells it to apply the command to a non-selected pattern space and the $ addresses the last line of input
• s/\n//g substitutes a newline with a space
• p writes pattern space to standard output

If you can make this work with BSD sed please let me know.

Our PASTA (Processor Automated Synthesis by iTerative Analysis Project) research group has a new website. The content is still quite incomplete but over the next few weeks we shall bring it all into shape. So stay tuned….