Also See: CoMeT Simulator

CoMeT: CoMeT is next-generation open-source EDA toolchain for integrated core-memory interval thermal simulations of 2D, 2.5, and 3D multi-/many-core processors. CoMeT (partially) subsumes the code of HotSniper.

Download CoMeT

HotSniper

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

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

The HotSniper User Manual

Please refer to Hot Sniper User Manual to learn how to write custom scheduling policies that perform thermal-aware Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS), Task Mapping, and Task Migration.

Ground Rules

Found a Bug, Report Here! Have a Question, Ask Here!

No Direct Emails.

1- Requirements

Docker

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

After installing Docker, make sure you are able to run it without needing sudo by following instructions here - https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/linux-postinstall/

PinPlay

Extract Pinplay 3.2 to the root HotSniper directory as pin_kit

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 HotSniper

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

cd docker
sudo apt install make
make
make run

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

cd ..

HotSpot

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

cd hotspot
make
cd ..

HotSniper

make

3- Compiling the Benchmarks

Run inside container:

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

4- Running the Simulations

HotSniper 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 (22nm or larger)
  • 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)
• [ ] 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
• [ ] specify the floorplan with the floorplan parameter, the corresponding the thermal model with the hotspot_config parameter and other thermal settings in config
  • config/base.cfg: periodic_thermal
  • tdp is defined by the floorplan, temperature limits and cooling parameters.
  • make sure that the perf_model/cache/levels is set to 3 if the floorplan has a L3 cache and it set to 2 if it does not.
  • The hotspot directory contains floorplans and corresponding hotspot configurations for a four core, a sixteen core and a sixty-four core gainestown processor.
• [ ] To create a new floorplan use the create script from the floorplanlib directory. For example to create a sixteen core gainestown floorplan run this command outside the docker environment:
  • ./create.py --cores 4x4 --subcore-template gainestown_core.flp --out gainestown_4x4
  • Copy the generated floorplan gainestown_4x4.flp and the hotspot config file gainestown_4x4.hotspot_config from the generated gainestown_4x4 directory to the hotspot directory. And then set the configuration parameters floorplan and hotspot_config in base.cfg to point to these new floorplan and hotspot configuration files.
  • When you change the number of cores you will also need to update the NUMBER_CORES as was mentioned above.
  • For larger floorplans we recommend changing the -model_type to grid in the hotspot configuration file to speed the thermals calculation.
• [ ] To get track the wearout of the components enable the reliability modeling in the reliability section.
• [ ] 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

Using Heartbeat Functionality

HotSniper supports program performance monitoring using the Heartbeat Framework. Several PARSEC programs are supported out of the box, which are: blackscholes, bodytrack, canneal, dedup, fluidanimate, streamcluster, swaptions and x264.

Enabling heartbeat functionality:

• Set simulationcontrol/config.py::ENABLE_HEARTBEATS variable to True
• Add the "hb_enabled" string to the base_configuration argument of simulationcontrol/run.py::run() function call.

The "simulationcontrol/run.py::run_multi()" function serves as a template for the second step.

With these two parameters set, the simulation will start with Heartbeat functionality enabled, resulting in the collection of heartbeat data files for each program, identified by the program app ids. A simulation running one program will result in the "0.hb.log" file, accompanied with the "0.hb.png" and "0.hb.histogram.png" visualizations.

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/

HeartBeats: "https://github.com/libheartbeats/heartbeats"