title: PARSEC tags: - x86 - fullsystem layout: default permalink: resources/parsec shortdoc: > Resources to build a disk image with the parsec workloads. author: [“Mahyar Samani”] license: BSD-3-Clause

This document includes instructions on how to create an Ubuntu 18.04 disk-image with PARSEC benchmark installed. The disk-image will be compatible with the gem5 simulator. It also demostrates how tosimulate the same using an example gem5 script with a pre-configured system. The script uses a pre-built disk-image.

This is how the src/parsec-tests/ directory will look like if all the artifacts are created correctly.

parsec/
  |___ gem5/                                   # gem5 folder
  |
  |___ disk-image/
  |      |___ build.sh                         # the script downloading packer binary and building the disk image
  |      |___ shared/
  |      |___ parsec/
  |             |___ parsec-image/
  |             |      |___ parsec             # the disk image will be here
  |             |___ parsec.json               # the Packer script
  |             |___ parsec-install.sh         # the script to install PARSEC
  |             |___ post-installation.sh      # the script to install m5
  |             |___ runscript.sh              # script to run each workload
  |             |___ parsec-benchmark          # the parsec benchmark suite
  |
  |___ README.md

Building the disk image

In order to build the disk-image for PARSEC tests with gem5, build the m5 utility in src/parsec-tests/ using the following:

git clone https://gem5.googlesource.com/public/gem5
cd gem5/util/m5
scons build/x86/out/m5

We use packer to create our disk-image. The instructions on how to install packer is shown below:

cd disk-image
./build.sh          # the script downloading packer binary and building the disk image

In order to build the disk-image first the script needs to be validated. Run the following command to validate disk-image/parsec/parsec.json.

./packer validate parsec/parsec.json

After the script has been successfuly validated you can create the disk-image by runnning:

./packer build parsec/parsec.json

You can find the disk-image in parsec/parsec-image/parsec.

Simulating PARSEC using an example script

An example script with a pre-configured system is available in the following directory within the gem5 repository:

gem5/configs/example/gem5_library/x86-parsec-benchmarks.py

The example script specifies a system with the following parameters:

• A SimpleSwitchableProcessor (KVM for startup and TIMING for ROI execution). There are 2 CPU cores, each clocked at 3 GHz.
• 2 Level MESI_Two_Level cache with 32 kB L1I and L1D size, and, 256 kB L2 size. The L1 cache(s) has associativity of 8, and, the L2 cache has associativity 16. There are 2 L2 cache banks.
• The system has 3 GB SingleChannelDDR4_2400 memory.
• The script uses x86-linux-kernel-4.19.83 and x86-parsec, the disk image created from following the instructions in this README.md.

The example script must be run with the X86_MESI_Two_Level binary. To build:

git clone https://gem5.googlesource.com/public/gem5
cd gem5
scons build/X86/gem5.opt -j<proc>

Once compiled, you may use the example config file to run the PARSEC benchmark programs using the following command:

# In the gem5 directory
build/X86/gem5.opt \
configs/example/gem5_library/x86-parsec-benchmarks.py \
--benchmark <benchmark_program> \
--size <size> \

Description of the two arguments, provided in the above command are:

• --benchmark, which refers to one of 13 benchmark programs, provided in the PARSEC benchmark suite. These include blackscholes, bodytrack, canneal, dedup, facesim, ferret, fluidanimate, freqmine, raytrace, streamcluster, swaptions, vips, x264. For more information on the workloads can be found at https://parsec.cs.princeton.edu/.
• --size, which refers to the size of the workload to simulate. There are three valid choices for the same: simsmall, simmedium and simlarge.