Extensible Networking Platform 1 Liquid Architecture Cycle Accurate Performance Measurement Richard Hough Phillip Jones, Scott Friedman, Roger Chamberlain, Jason Fritts, John Lockwood, and Ron Cytron Funded by NSF Grant ITR

Extensible Networking Platform 2 Liquid ArchitectureOutline Introduction Motivation Background Architecture Usage Results Future Work Related Work Conclusion

Extensible Networking Platform 3 Liquid Architecture Introduction – What Are We Doing? Creating a module for capturing cycle- accurate profiles of hardware events during the runtime of programs on real systems

Extensible Networking Platform 4 Liquid Architecture Introduction – What Are We Doing? Creating a module for capturing cycle- accurate profiles of hardware events during the runtime of programs on real systems Statistics Module

Extensible Networking Platform 5 Liquid Architecture Introduction – What Are We Doing? Creating a module for capturing cycle- accurate profiles of hardware events during the runtime of programs on real systems Statistics Module Program Runtime Program Bottlenecks

Extensible Networking Platform 6 Liquid Architecture Introduction – What Are We Doing? Creating a module for capturing cycle- accurate profiles of hardware events during the runtime of programs on real systems Statistics Module Program Runtime Program Bottlenecks Cache Hits Memory Accesses ISA Decoding

Extensible Networking Platform 7 Liquid Architecture Introduction – What Are We Doing? Creating a module for capturing cycle- accurate profiles of hardware events during the runtime of programs on real systems Statistics Module Program Runtime Program Bottlenecks Cache Hits Memory Accesses ISA Decoding

Extensible Networking Platform 8 Liquid Architecture Background - FPX Designed and implemented on the FPX platform The FPX platform is: –Designed for developing pluggable network circuits –Contains a Virtex 2000e FPGA for design deployment –Possesses a smaller FPGA used as a network interface device Can potentially operate at gigabit line rates

Extensible Networking Platform 9 Liquid Architecture Background - LEON2 Developed by Gaisler Research –Sparc-V8 –Open-Source VHDL –Widely used European Space Agency, etc. –Second in popularity only to the Microblaze

Extensible Networking Platform 10 Liquid Architecture Motivation – Why Not Use Software? Software Profiling Is: –Inaccurate Many data points estimated Time slices not absolute Profiling affects results –Inefficient Unreasonable for real-system deployment –Ineffective Difficult to separate OS overhead

Extensible Networking Platform 11 Liquid Architecture Motivation – Why Not Use Simulation? Simulation is: –Slow A simple simulation could require 100X more time than running the program –Bound by the quality of the model The model used may be inaccurate Processors often tweaked without updating the documentation [Larus]

Extensible Networking Platform 12 Liquid Architecture Motivation – Why Use FPGAs? ASICs are expensive –FPGAs provide good blend of cost and accuracy Software simulation of processors is incredibly slow Allows for easy prototyping –Test new caching methods, tweak the ISA, etc.

Extensible Networking Platform 13 Liquid Architecture Motivation – Why Put Statsmod In A FPGA? The Statistics Module Allows You To: –Pull Event Signals from anywhere –Evaluate both software and hardware optimizations Tweak the architecture Integrate hardware accelerated modules into software solutions Adjust the software algorithm –Gather repeatable and reliable results

Extensible Networking Platform 14 Liquid Architecture Architecture – Naïve Solution Interested in 10 events and counters –Naïve solution implements a counter for each possibility 100 counters! –Not scalable for large systems

Extensible Networking Platform 15 Liquid Architecture Architecture – Our Solution Better Approach –Associate counters to events and methods at run time –Covers the problem area, but uses less chip space

Extensible Networking Platform 16 Liquid Architecture Architecture – An In Depth Look

Extensible Networking Platform 17 Liquid Architecture Architecture – Scalability Address Range Registers Counters Events Naïve Approach

Extensible Networking Platform 18 Liquid Architecture Usage

Extensible Networking Platform 19 Liquid Architecture Results – What do we get? The next few slides contain data from the Linpack benchmark running on the FPGA –Linpack is a FPU intensive benchmark While the following slides focus on runtime, it is important to remember that the graphs could in principle be of *any* event

Extensible Networking Platform 20 Liquid Architecture Results 323,686,726 Clock Cycles

Extensible Networking Platform 21 Liquid Architecture Results

Extensible Networking Platform 22 Liquid Architecture Results

Extensible Networking Platform 23 Liquid Architecture Results

Extensible Networking Platform 24 Liquid Architecture Future Work – Where can we go? As of a week ago, the StatsMod was successfully integrated into a Linux OS running on Leon –Changes have been made to allow a clear separation between Process IDs OS, background tasks, threads –A device driver allows any program, including the program being profiled, to gather the statistics

Extensible Networking Platform 25 Liquid Architecture Future Work – Where can we go? Programs could now potentially collect statistics on themselves perform runtime introspection –Adjust operation to conserve power, memory accesses, etc. –Deeper integration could occur at the kernel level to affect scheduler decisions Adds a new dimension for slicing resources –Network activity, device activity, page faults, etc.

Extensible Networking Platform 26 Liquid Architecture Related Work SnoopP –Developed by Lesley Shannon and Paul Chow at the University of Toronto –Collects timing characteristics of programs running on a Microblaze processor Focuses on clock cycles only –Integrated into the EDK

Extensible Networking Platform 27 Liquid Architecture Conclusion In closing, I would like to thank: –Phillip Jones for his hard work and support –Ron Cytron for his mentoring and persistence –Scott Friedman for his work on the web interface –The rest of the Liquid Architecture team –And WISA for the invitation to present

Extensible Networking Platform 28 Liquid Architecture Questions?

Extensible Networking Platform 29 Liquid Architecture Background – Liquid

Extensible Networking Platform 30 Liquid Architecture Usage 1.Connect to a secure web server controlling the FPGA hardware 2.Upload the desired binary executable, associated mapfile, and desired programming bitfile 3.A perl script parses the map file and provides a graphical interface for selecting the desired address ranges and events 4.Statistic results are tabulated at the end of the program’s execution