CS7290 Advanced microarchitecture
Fall 2014
Instructor: Prof. Hyesoon Kim
Due: September 2 (Tuesday) 6 pm

Overview:
The purpose of this project is to get familiar with the MacSim simulator and architecture simulations. In this project, you will implement 2 branch predictors including perceptron branch predictor. You are free to implement any branch predictors for the other one (your own designs or from literatures) but it should show a better accuracy than the gshare branch predictor. This is a group project with the maximum 2 students.

Grading policy:

• (25 points) Implementation of 2 different branch predictors
• (75 points) Discussions in the reports
• Extra 10 points: Implementing a branch predictor that has higher a branch predictor accuracy than perceptron branch predictor. (both predictors should have around 8 KB size)

What to submit:

• [1]Report: You will write a 2-page double column report with IEEE format
  The report might have the following 5 sections: 1. Introduction 2. Branch predictors 3. Evaluation methodology 4. Results and discussions 5. Conclusions
  
  
• [2] source code: bp_gshare.cc and bp_gshare.h . Use bp_gshare.cc/h to write branch predictor code.

Evaluation methodology.
Please simulate only 30 M instructions. The traces are provided in T-square(resource section). Use params_x86 for the params.in file

• exp1: 6 benchmarks with different branch predictor sizes (2KB, 4KB, 8KB, 16KB, 32KB). Include gshare and perceptron branch predictor, and anothr branch predictor that you implemented.
  
• exp2: With 4KB branch predictor size, change the front-end depth from 5, 10, 15 and see the performance Report IPC and branch predictor accuracy
  
  

Instructions:
You can download the macsim at github and see the documentations

main files to modify: bp.cc bp_gshare.cc, you might need to modify other files but please put the main branch predictor code inside bp_gshare.cc/h files.

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Last modified: Mon Aug 18 19:18:40 EDT 2014