HotSniper 7

An EDA toolchain for interval thermal simulations of 2D multi-/many-cores in an open system.

Note: If you have a problem, please first browse the closed issues here - https://github.com/anujpathania/HotSniper/issues. If your problem continues to remain unresolved, please feel free to contact us by raising a new issue. Also, please do not forget to close the issue once we have addressed your problem. We prefer not to resolve issues over e-mail.

Publication

HotSniper: Sniper-Based Toolchain for Many-Core Thermal Simulations in Open Systems

Details of HotSniper can be found in our ESL 2018 paper, and please consider citing this paper in your work if you find this tool useful in your research.

Pathania, Anuj, and Jörg Henkel. "HotSniper: Sniper-Based Toolchain for Many-Core Thermal Simulations in Open Systems." IEEE Embedded Systems Letters 11.2 (2018): 54-57.

IEEE Xplore

1- Requirements

Docker

HotSniper7 compiles and runs inside a Docker container. Therefore, you need to download & install Docker. For more info: https://www.docker.com/

PinPlay

Download and extract Pinplay 3.2 to the root HotSniper7 directory as pin_kit

wget https://software.intel.com/content/dam/develop/external/us/en/protected/pinplay-drdebug-3.2-pin-3.2-81205-gcc-linux.tar.gz
tar xf pinplay-drdebug-3.2-pin-3.2-81205-gcc-linux.tar.gz
mv pinplay-drdebug-3.2-pin-3.2-81205-gcc-linux pin_kit

2- Compiling HotSniper7

At this stage, the root HotSniper7 directory has a folder named pin_kit containing the PinPlay-3.2 library and a folder named hotspotcontaining the compiled HotSpot simulator. Since you now have Docker installed, let's create a container using the shipped Dockerfile.

cd docker
make
make run

Now that we are inside our container, we can build HotSniper 7 and its requirements:

cd ..

HotSpot

The [HotSpot] simulator is shipped with HotSniper7. All you need to do is to compile it:

cd hotspot
make
cd ..

HotSniper 7

make

3- Compiling the Benchmarks

Run inside container:

#setting $GRAPHITE_ROOT to HotSniper7's root directory
export GRAPHITE_ROOT=$(pwd)
cd benchmarks
#setting $BENCHMARKS_ROOT to the benchmarks directory
export BENCHMARKS_ROOT=$(pwd)
#compiling the benchmarks
make

4- Running the Simulations

HotSniper7 is shipped with a simulationcontrol script that you can use to run batch simulations. Run inside container:

cd simulationcontrol
PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8" python3 run.py

The path of the results' directory can be set inside the simulationcontrol/config.py file.

5- Evaluate your results

Quickly list the finished simulations:

cd simulationcontrol
PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8" python3 parse_results.py

Each run is stored in a separate directory in the results directory (see 4). For quick visual check, many plots are automatically generated for you (IPS, power, etc).

To do your own (automated) evaluations, see the simulationcontrol.resultlib package for a set of helper functions to parse the results. See the source code of parse_results.py for a few examples.

Configuration Checklist

• select technology node
  • config/base.cfg: power/technology_node
• V/f-levels
  • check scripts/energystats.py: build_dvfs_table (keep in mind that V/f-levels are specified at 22nm)
• power scaling (if technology node < 22nm)
  • check tools/mcpat.py: scale_power
• select high-level architecture
  • simulationcontrol/config.py: SNIPER_CONFIG and NUMBER_CORES
• set architectural parameters
  • config/base.cfg and other config files as specified in the previous step
• set scheduling and DVFS parameters
  • config/base.cfg: scheduler/open/* and scheduler/open/dvfs/*
• set perf_model/core/frequency
• start trial run to extract estimations from McPAT
  • start a simulation based on simulationcontrol/run.py: test_static_power, kill it after ~5ms simulated time
  • extract static power at low/high V/f levels from the command line output: take power of last / second-to-last core
  • extract area of a core from benchmarks/energystats-temp.txt: take processor area (including L3 cache etc.), divide by number of cores, and scale it to your technology node. If file is empty, start simulation again, kill it, and check again.
• configure static power consumption
  • config/base.cfg: power/*
  • inactive_power must be set to static power consumption at min V/f level
• create floorplan (*.flp) and corresponding thermal model (*.bin)
  • Option 1: use your own floorplan
    • use [MatEX] to create the thermal model (-eigen_out) from your floorplan
  • Option 2: use [thermallib] to create a simple regular floorplan (only per-core temperature, no finer granularity) and the corresponding thermal model
    • core width is sqrt(core area) from McPAT area estimations
    • example: python3 create_thermal_model.py --amb 45 --crit 80 --core_naming sniper --core_width [core width] model [cores]x[cores]
    • NOTE: McPAT area estimations are high, i.e., observed temperatures are too low. Therefore, using a smaller core size should be considered as an option.
• specify floorplan, thermal model and other thermal settings in config
  • config/base.cfg: periodic_thermal
  • tdp is defined by the floorplan, temperature limits and cooling parameters
• create your scenarios
  • simulationcontrol/run.py (e.g., similar to def example)
• set your output folder for traces
  • simulationcontrol/config.py: RESULTS_FOLDER
  • This folder usually is outside of the HotSniper folder because we don't want to commit results (large files) to the simulator repo.
• verify all configurations in sim.cfg of a finished run

HOWTO

A- Implement your own mapping / DVFS policy

These policies are implemented in common/scheduler/policies. Mapping policies derive from MappingPolicy, DVFS policies derive from DVFSPolicy. After implementing your policy, instantiate it in SchedulerOpen::initMappingPolicy / SchedulerOpen::initDVFSPolicy.

Common Errors

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character '\xb0' in position 61: ordinal not in range(128)

export PYTHONIOENCODING="UTF-8"

Code Acknowledgements

Sniper: http://snipersim.org

McPat: https://www.hpl.hp.com/research/mcpat/

HotSpot: http://lava.cs.virginia.edu/HotSpot/

MatEx: http://ces.itec.kit.edu/846.php

thermallib: https://github.com/ma-rapp/thermallib