Resources for project work

We have acquired a 2 GB disk for use by the class during the course of the semester. The disk is at /disks/stampede/sandbox2/. This will (hopefully) very shortly be accessible from the dawn machines on the NOW cluster. The machines dawn0 through dawn31, which are SPARC workstations running Solaris 2.4, can be used for cs252 project work. This space has to be shared amongst the whole class. I will not be setting up any quotas, so you're on your own to be courteous to others. (I will try to set something up that periodically collects stats on disk usage, so you can see who's hogging all of the space.) Make sure not to leave large core files laying around, and use local scratch space for large, temporary files. The following scratch areas (i.e. not backed up) are available:

/disks/now/a
/disks/now/b
/disks/now/c
/disks/now/d
/disks/now/e
/disks/now/f

Everyone in the class will have directories within /disks/stampede/sandbox2/cs252/. For those of you that already have CS accounts, when you log into the dawn machines, your home directory will be the same as what it currently is. For those of you that have guest accounts (which will expire once the semester is over), you home directory will be within /disks/stampede/sandbox2/cs252/.

There is a generic class directory, /disks/stampede/sandbox2/cs252/cs252/. Various tidbits of information, including links to tools, benchmarks, and other useful directories, can be found there.

Some of you have much more disk space available to you than others. If you do not really need to use the disk space on stampede, please consider using space elsewhere so that those students whose home directories are on file systems that are always stuck at 100% capacity have more of an opportunity for space. Remember that you all have 20 MB of storage available on the instructional machines.

Note that you are not limited to using just the dawn machines for cs252 work. You can use any resources that are at your disposal - this department has a wide variety of machines, including SPARC, HP, DEC MIPS, DEC Alpha, SGI, and x86. Some tools work on some machines and not on others.

Search Utilities

• melvyl
  
• gladis
  
• NCSTRL - National Computer Science Technical Reports Library
  
• NCSTRL at UC Berkeley CS
  
• The Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies
  
• AltaVista
  
• HotBot
  
• Yahoo
  

Tools

• Tools: a short story, by Remzi Arpaci, briefly describes pixie, pixstats, prof, dinero, qpt, CPROF, spim, Cacti, shade, and spixtools. Most of the specific directories and files mentioned are on the instructional machines.
• Wisconsin Architectural Research Tool Set (WARTS) - including QPT, QPT2, CPROF, Tycho, dineroIII, and EEL
  
• ATOM - A toolkit that can be used for tracing, and much more. Only runs on Alphas. Log in to either saidin.eecs (an instructional machine) or speeding.cs (on the same file system as the NOW machines)
  
• EEL - A toolkit that can be used for tracing, and much more. Only runs on SPARCs.
  See the following class project for some more details.
• Etch - A tracing tool for Intel x86 platforms running either Win95, WinNT, or Linux. Courtesy of Harvard University and the University of Washington.
• Instruction-Level Simulation And Tracing - This contains a huge list of simulators, emulators, and tracing tools, including an extensive bibliography as well as list of people to contact
  

Benchmarks

• The Performance Database Server
  
• Benchmarks FAQ - from the newsgroup comp.benchmarks
  
• SPEC benchmarks - benchmark suite from the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation
  
• bench - network benchmark program for IP networks that measures bulk transfer throughput and round trip delays using either TCP/IP or UDP/IP
  
• lmbench - micro-benchmark suite that measures system latency and bandwidth of data movement among the processor and memory, network, file system, and disk
  
• ttcp - times transmission and reception of data between two systems using UDP and TCP protocols
  

Traces

• Etch Traces - user level traces of Windows NT applications collected using Etch.
• Monster Traces - Traces of 8 applications (run under Ultrix and Mach) collected with a hardware monitor on a DEC-MIPS workstation. Includes user and kernel activity. First presented in a paper which appeared in ISCA95. Courtesy of Richard Uhlig (thanks to Christoforos for getting them). More details forthcoming when these are actually available.
• Patchwrx - Single-processor portions of traces, containing user and kernel references, from 2 spec benchmarks and a database, running under Windows NT on an Alpha. Courtesy of Dick Sites, from DEC. A few projects from last spring's IRAM class as well as a Spring 1996 CS 252 projects detail some caveats concerning the accuracy of these traces (and of Dick Sites' conclusions regarding "Caches Don't Work".)
• New Mexico State Univ Trace Database

CPU info

• The CPU Info Center has a good summary of high-level info
• MIPS does a very good job of providing on-line documentation
• Intel's web page is generally full of marketing crap, but there's a neat Intel Secrets page, which is subtitled "What Intel Doesn't Want You To Know"
• I have some hardcopy documentation on DEC Alpha microprocessors. I am willing to briefly loan them for making selective copies, or I can provide you with information as to how you can order (for free) your own copy.

Last modified, 18-Oct-1996.
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