Experimental approach

  1. For a fixed L1 cache size (64kB) and L2 cache size (512kB), the following parameters were varied: block-size, replacement-policy and associativity. 3 SPEC2000 benchmarks were used for experimentation, namely: bzip00, gzip00 and art00*. These PISA binaries (WATTCH can only run binaries in PISA format) were obtained from the SimpleScalar website: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/mirv/benchmarks/benchmarks.html
  2. The power values for the different functional units and the # of simulation cycles needed were obtained by executing the binaries using WATTCH (in 180nm technology). HOTSPOT is an architectural level thermal simulator that intakes a power-trace file and a floorplan file and outputs the steady-state temperature values for the different functional units (block-level granularity). We used the default Alpha EV6 floorplan and used the power traces obtained from WATTCH (for each of the benchmarks) to run HOTSPOT. The corresponding temperature values were stored in a database along with the energy and delay values obtained previously.
  3. Choose benchmark to perform simulation

    Energy values for bzip00 and gzip00 are in mJoules

    Energy values are in uJoules for art00 benchmark.