question is about running benchmark and aging gem5 - gem5

I am working on gem5, until now I ran ARM Full-system And Mcpat. In the following my project, I need to compute aging for ARM-Fullsystem.I interest to use your framework for computing aging ARm-fullsysytem on gem5. How can I use your framework for my project?
and I read paper about compute aging:"Cross-Layer Approaches for an Aging-Aware Design Space Exploration for Microprocessors".
<< and in the paper , introduced two frameworks(extra time and RTL) and ExtraTime can be used in early design phases to allow the design of aging-aware microprocessors, while the RTL-framework is employed in later phases to fine-tune the design.">>
also I need to run spec cpu 2006 on ARM-fullsystem.can anybody say how to run spec cpu 2006 or introduce source and document about it?

Related

What is the difference between the gem5 CPU models and which one is more accurate for my simulation?

When running a simulation in gem5, I can select a CPU with fs.py --cpu-type.
This option can also show a list of all CPU types if I use an invalid CPU type such as fs.py --cpu-type.
What is the difference between those CPU types and which one should I choose for my experiment?
Question inspired by: https://www.mail-archive.com/gem5-users#gem5.org/msg16976.html
An overview of the CPU types can be found at: https://cirosantilli.com/linux-kernel-module-cheat/#gem5-cpu-types
In summary:
simplistic CPUs (derived from BaseSimpleCPU): for example AtomicSimpleCPU (the default one). They have no CPU pipeline, and therefor are completely unrealistic. However, they also run much faster. Therefore,they are mostly useful to boot Linux fast and then checkpoint and switch to a more detailed CPU.
Within the simple CPUs we can notably distinguish:
AtomicSimpleCPU: memory requests finish immediately
TimingSimpleCPU: memory requests actually take time to go through to the memory system and return. Since there is no CPU pipeline however, the simulated CPU stalls on every memory request waiting for a response.
An alternative to those is to use KVM CPUs to speed up boot if host and guest ISA are the same, although as of 2019, KVM is less stable as it is harder to implement and debug.
in-order CPUs: derived from the generic MinorCPU by parametrization, Minor stands for In Order:
for ARM: HPI is made by ARM and models a "(2017) modern in-order Armv8-A implementation". This is your best in-order ARM bet.
out-of-order CPUs, derived from the generic DerivO3CPU by parametrization, O3 stands for Out Of Order:
for ARM: there are no models specifically published by ARM as of 2019. The only specific O3 model available is ex5_big for an A15, but you would have to verify its authors claims on how well it models the real core A15 core.
If none of those are accurate enough for your purposes, you could try to create your own in-order/out-of-order models by parametrizing MinorCPU / DerivO3CPU like HPI and ex5_big do, although this could be hard to get right, as there isn't generally enough public information on non-free CPUs to do this without experiments or reverse engineering.
The other thing you will want to think about is the memory system model. There are basically two choices: classical vs Ruby, and within Ruby, several options are available, see also: https://cirosantilli.com/linux-kernel-module-cheat/#gem5-ruby-build

Is There An Exhaustive Profiler?

Relatively often I see people benchmark/profile (or advise someone else to benchmark/profile) a specific piece of code in one specific circumstance on one specific CPU in one specific computer; and then (potentially falsely) assume that this result applies to code in different circumstances (e.g. other logical CPUs in the same core under different loads) on a wide variety of very different CPUs (e.g. "all 64-bit 80x86") in a wide variety of different computers (e.g. with different RAM timings, etc).
What I'm looking for is a kind of profiler that is able to generate profiling results for many CPUs under many conditions (primarily through interpreting the code rather than direct measurement); and then combine all of the results using weighting factors (where weighting factors represent how much the user cares about each measured case) to create a result that is actually useful and not misleading.
Is there any profiling tool that fits this description?
I think there is no universal performance forecasting tool published in Internet; but there may be some inside CPU vendors to optimize next microarchitectures.
There is valgrind binary instrumentation platform with callgrind/cachegrind (slow) simple model profilers. Callgrind counts basic block executions in model like 1 instruction is something like 1 cpu clock; cachegrind additionally instruments models memory accesses with some 2 level cache model and also may model simple branch predictor. Both tools has no knowledge/models of wide decode/execution/retire capabilities of modern OOO CPUs from Vendor 1 and Vendor 2 of "all 64-bit 80x86"-compatible CPUs (and OOO cpus are similar in basic OOO capabilities and performance).
There were several open-source projects of OOO CPU simulators (from slow to very slow) like: MARSSx86 (http://marss86.org/, 2012) based on PTLsim (http://www.facom.ufms.br/~ricardo/Courses/CompArchII/Tools/PTLSim/PTLsimManual.pdf, 2007), or Sniper Multi-Core Simulator (with help of Graphite framework). (There is also DRAMSim/DRAMSim2 memory simulator which is needed for accurate system simulation and it is used in several other simulator projects; it can be optionally used in RISC-V Rocket-Chip simulator)
You may be interested in some (very-very slow - tens KIPS) cycle-accurate simulator / microarchitecture simulator, but there are not too many open source variants of them. There are some commercial simulators (for example in ARM world - ARM Cycle Models / CPAKs; ARC nSIM, ...); or simplescalar.com. There are also in-house proprietary simulators (no access to them for us).
The only public approximation to microarchitecture/cycle simulator is Vendor 1's IACA: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-architecture-code-analyzer (inexact partial model of OOO port planning for short code sequences like inner loops without any memory hierarchy modeling). And there is other tool "SDE" from Vendor 1 to estimate/debug some future CPU instruction extensions with older CPUs and PIN binary rewriting tool: https://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-software-development-emulator.

How can I speed up deep learning on a non-NVIDIA setup?

Since I only have an AMD A10-7850 APU, and do not have the funds to spend on a $800-$1200 NVIDIA graphics card, I am trying to make due with the resources I have in order to speed up deep learning via tensorflow/keras.
Initially, I used a pre-compiled version of Tensorflow. InceptionV3 would take about 1000-1200 seconds to compute 1 epoch. It has been painfully slow.
To speed up calculations, I first self-compiled Tensorflow with optimizers (using AVX, and SSE4 instructions). This lead to a roughly 40% decrease in computation times. The same computations performed above now only take about 600 seconds to compute. It's almost bearable - kind of like you can watch paint dry.
I am looking for ways to further decrease computation times. I only have an integrated AMD graphics card that is part of the APU. (How) (C/c)an I make use of this resource to speed up computation even more?
More generally, let's say there are other people with similar monetary restrictions and Intel setups. How can anyone WITHOUT discrete NVIDIA cards make use of their integrated graphics chips or otherwise non-NVIDIA setup to achieve faster than CPU-only performance? Is that possible? Why/Why not? What needs to be done to achieve this goal? Or will this be possible in the near future (2-6 months)? How?
After researching this topic for a few months, I can see 3.5 possible paths forward:
1.) Tensorflow + OpenCl as mentioned in the comments above:
There seems to be some movement going on this field. Over at Codeplay, Lukasz Iwanski just posted a comprehensive answer on how to get tensorflow to run with opencl here (I will only provide a link as stated above because the information might change there): https://www.codeplay.com/portal/03-30-17-setting-up-tensorflow-with-opencl-using-sycl
The potential to use integrated graphics is alluring. It's also worth exploring the use of this combination with APUs. But I am not sure how well this will work since OpenCl support is still early in development, and hardware support is very limited. Furthermore, OpenCl is not the same as a handcrafted library of optimized code. (UPDATE 2017-04-24: I have gotten the code to compile after running into some issues here!) Unfortunately, the hoped for speed improvements ON MY SETUP (iGPU) did not materialize.
CIFAR 10 Dataset:
Tensorflow (via pip ak unoptimized): 1700sec/epoch at 390% CPU
utilization.
Tensorflow (SSE4, AVX): 1100sec/epoch at 390% CPU
utilization.
Tensorflow (opencl + iGPU): 5800sec/epoch at 150% CPU
and 100% GPU utilization.
Your mileage may vary significantly. So I am wondering what are other people getting relatively speaking (unoptimized vs optimized vs opencl) on your setups?
What should be noted: opencl implementation means that all the heavy computation should be done on the GPU. (Updated on 2017/4/29) But in reality this is not the case yet because some functions have not been implemented yet. This leads to unnecessary copying back and forth of data between CPU and GPU ram. Again, imminent changes should improve the situation. And furthermore, for those interested in helping out and those wanting to speed things up, we can do something that will have a measurable impact on the performance of tensorflow with opencl.
But as it stands for now: 1 iGPU << 4 CPUS with SSE+AVX. Perhaps beefier GPUs with larger RAM and/or opencl 2.0 implementation could have made a larger difference.
At this point, I should add that similar efforts have been going on with at least Caffe and/or Theano + OpenCl. The limiting step in all cases appears to be the manual porting of CUDA/cuDNN functionality to the openCl paradigm.
2.) RocM + MIOpen
RocM stands for Radeon Open Compute and seems to be a hodgepodge of initiatives that is/will make deep-learning possible on non-NVIDIA (mostly Radeon devices). It includes 3 major components:
HIP: A tool that converts CUDA code to code that can be consumed by AMD GPUs.
ROCk: a 64-bit linux kernel driver for AMD CPU+GPU devices.
HCC: A C/C++ compiler that compiles code into code for a heterogeneous system architecture environment (HSA).
Apparently, RocM is designed to play to AMDs strenghts of having both CPU and GPU technology. Their approach to speeding up deep-learning make use of both components. As an APU owner, I am particularly interested in this possibility. But as a cautionary note: Kaveri APUs have limited support (only integrated graphcs is supported). Future APUs have not been released yet. And it appears, there is still a lot of work that is being done here to bring this project to a mature state. A lot of work will hopefully make this approach viable within a year given that AMD has announced their Radeon Instinct cards will be released this year (2017).
The problem here for me is that that RocM is providing tools for building deep learning libraries. They do not themselves represent deep learning libraries. As a data scientist who is not focused on tools development, I just want something that works. and am not necessarily interested in building what I want to then do the learning. There are not enough hours in the day to do both well at the company I am at.
NVIDIA has of course CUDA and cuDNN which are libaries of hand-crafted assembler code optimized for NVIDIA GPUs. All major deep learning frameworks build on top of these proprietary libraries. AMD currently does not have anything like that at all.
I am uncertain how successfully AMD will get to where NVIDIA is in this regard. But there is some light being shone on what AMDs intentions are in an article posted by Carlos Perez on 4/3/2017 here. A recent lecture at Stanford also talks in general terms about Ryzen, Vega and deep learning fit together. In essence, the article states that MIOpen will represent this hand-crafted library of optimized deep learning functions for AMD devices. This library is set to be released in H1 of 2017. I am uncertain how soon these libraries would be incorporated into the major deep learning frameworks and what the scope of functional implementation will be then at this time.
But apparently, AMD has already worked with the developers of Caffe to "hippify" the code basis. Basically, CUDA code is converted automatically to C code via HIP. The automation takes care of the vast majority of the code basis, leaving only less than 0.5% of code had to be changed and required manual attention. Compare that to the manual translation into openCl code, and one starts getting the feeling that this approach might be more sustainable. What I am not clear about is where the lower-level assembler language optimization come in.
(Update 2017-05-19) But with the imminent release of AMD Vega cards (the professional Frontier Edition card not for consumers will be first), there are hints that major deep learning frameworks will be supported through the MIOpen framework. A Forbes article released today shows the progress MiOpen has taken over just the last couple of months in terms of performance: it appears significant.
(Update 2017-08-25) MiOpen has officially been released. We are no longer talking in hypotheticals here. Now we just need to try out how well this framework works.
3.) Neon
Neon is Nervana's (now acquired by Intel) open-source deep-learning framework. The reason I mention this framework is that it seems to be fairly straightforward to use. The syntax is about as easy and intuitive as Keras. More importantly though, this framework has achieved speeds up to 2x faster than Tensorflow on some benchmarks due to some hand-crafted assembler language optimization for those computations. Potentially, cutting computation times from 500 secs/epoch down to 300 secs/epoch is nothing to sneeze at. 300 secs = 5 minutes. So one could get 15 epochs in in an hour. and about 50 epochs in about 3.5 hours! But ideally, I want to do these kinds of calculations in under an hour. To get to those levels, I need to use a GPU, and at this point, only NVIDIA offers full support in this regard: Neon also uses CUDA and cuDNN when a GPU is available (and of course, it has to be an NVIDIA GPU). If you have access other Intel hardware this is of course a valid way to pursue. Afterall, Neon was developed out of a motivation to get things to work optimally also on non-NVIDIA setups (like Nervana's custom CPUs, and now Intel FPGAs or Xeon Phis).
3.5.) Intel Movidius
Update 2017-08-25: I came across this article. Intel has released a USB3.0-stick-based "deep learning" accelerator. Apparently, it works with Cafe and allows the user perform common Cafe-based fine-tuning of networks and inference. This is important stressing: If you want to train your own network from scratch, the wording is very ambiguous here. I will therefore assume, that apart from fine-tuning a network, training itself should still be done on something with more parallel compute. The real kicker though is this: When I checked for the pricing this stick costs a mere $79. That's nothing compared to the cost of your average NVIDIA 1070-80(ti) card. If you merely want to tackle some vision problems using common network topologies already available for some related tasks, you can use this stick to fine tune it to your own use, then compile the code and put it into this stick to do inference quickly. Many use cases can be covered with this stick, and for again $79 it could be worth it. This being Intel, they are proposing to go all out on Intel. Their model is to use the cloud (i.e. Nervana Cloud) for training. Then, use this chip for prototype inference or inference where energy consumption matters. Whether this is the right approach or not is left for the reader to answer.
At this time, it looks like deep learning without NVIDIA is still difficult to realize. Some limited speed gains are difficult but potentially possible through the use of opencl. Other initiatives sound promising but it will take time to sort out the real impact that these initiatives will have.
If your platform supports opencl you can look at using it with tensorflow. There is some experimental support for it on Linux at this github repository. Some preliminary instructions are at the documentation section of of this github repository.

Valgrind vs. Linux perf correlation

Suppose that I choose perf events instructions, LLC-load-misses, LLC-store-misses. Suppose further that I test a program prog varying its input. Is valgrind supposed to give me the "same" functional results for the same input and the same counter? That is, if one value in perf goes up, the one in valgrind should always do the same? Is there any impact in valgrind being a simulation that I should be aware of during profiling my code?
EDIT: BTW, before people grill me for not experimenting myself, I have to say that I (kinda) have, the problem is that I have a Sandybridge processor, and perf has a "bug" that prevents me from measuring LLC-* events. There is a patch, but I don't feel like recompiling my kernel...
Well, Cachegrind is a cache simulator. Even though it tries to mimic some of your hardware's characteristics (cache size, associativity, etc), it does not model every single feature and behavior of your system. Therefore you might in some cases see some differences.
For example, Valgrind's doc states that "Cachegrind simulates branch predictors intended to be typical of mainstream desktop/server processors of around 2004". Sandy Bridge processors first appeared in 2011, and you can guess that branch predictors have improved quite a lot since 2004.
That being said, Valgrind is still a wonderful tool to have in your toolbox.
What's the problem with perf's LLC events on Sandy Bridge processors? I use these events everyday at work on my Sandy Bridge laptop and it works as expected (archlinux 64bits, linux 3.6).

Why is the JVM stack-based and the Dalvik VM register-based?

I'm curious, why did Sun decide to make the JVM stack-based and Google decide to make the DalvikVM register-based?
I suppose the JVM can't really assume that a certain number of registers are available on the target platform, since it is supposed to be platform independent. Therefor it just postpones the register-allocation etc, to the JIT compiler. (Correct me if I'm wrong.)
So the Android guys thought, "hey, that's inefficient, let's go for a register based vm right away..."? But wait, there are multiple different android devices, what number of registers did the Dalvik target? Are the Dalvik opcodes hardcoded for a certain number of registers?
Do all current Android devices on the market have about the same number of registers? Or, is there a register re-allocation performed during dex-loading? How does all this fit together?
There are a few attributes of a stack-based VM that fit in well with Java's design goals:
A stack-based design makes very few
assumptions about the target
hardware (registers, CPU features),
so it's easy to implement a VM on a
wide variety of hardware.
Since the operands for instructions
are largely implicit, the object
code will tend to be smaller. This
is important if you're going to be
downloading the code over a slow
network link.
Going with a register-based scheme probably means that Dalvik's code generator doesn't have to work as hard to produce performant code. Running on an extremely register-rich or register-poor architecture would probably handicap Dalvik, but that's not the usual target - ARM is a very middle-of-the-road architecture.
I had also forgotten that the initial version of Dalvik didn't include a JIT at all. If you're going to interpret the instructions directly, then a register-based scheme is probably a winner for interpretation performance.
I can't find a reference, but I think Sun decided for the stack-based bytecode approach because it makes it easy to run the JVM on an architecture with few registers (e.g. IA32).
In Dalvik VM Internals from Google I/O 2008, the Dalvik creator Dan Bornstein gives the following arguments for choosing a register-based VM on slide 35 of the presentation slides:
Register Machine
Why?
avoid instruction dispatch
avoid unnecessary memory access
consume instruction stream efficiently (higher semantic density per instruction)
and on slide 36:
Register Machine
The stats
30% fewer instructions
35% fewer code units
35% more bytes in the instructions stream
but we get to consume two at a time
According to Bornstein this is "a general expectation what you could find when you convert a set of class files to dex files".
The relevant part of the presentation video starts at 25:00.
There is also an insightful paper titled "Virtual Machine Showdown: Stack Versus Registers" by Shi et al. (2005), which explores the differences between stack- and register-based virtual machines.
I don't know why Sun decided to make JVM stack based. Erlangs virtual machine, BEAM is register based for performance reasons. And Dalvik also seem to be register based because of performance reasons.
From Pro Android 2:
Dalvik uses registers as primarily units of data storage instead of the stack. Google is hoping to accomplish 30 percent fewer instructions as a result.
And regarding the code size:
The Dalvik VM takes the generated Java class files and combines them into one or more Dalvik Executables (.dex) files. It reuses duplicate information from multiple class files, effectively reducing the space requirement (uncompressed) by half from traditional .jar file. For example, the .dex file of the web browser app in Android is about 200k, whereas the equivalent uncompressed .jar version is about 500k. The .dex file of the alarm clock is about 50k, and roughly twice that size in its .jar version.
And as I remember Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach also conclude that a register machine perform better than a stack based machine.