About Mentor Project Journal Final Report
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July 5 - 9

Back to Debug Mode

I had my meeting presentation on Tuesday. It was very relaxed - I just prepared some graphs and notes to share what I'd done for the week. (Basically, I stressed myself out for it a lot more than I needed to.) After the meeting, I started looking back into what was going wrong with the filter cache configuration. I started by noting some differences in the statistics files that shouldn't be there, such as a large number of bus read accesses, and more system cycles for bus transferring data. Through some testing I also noticed a pattern - the number of system cycles increases as the amount of data read in memory decreases. This is the opposite of what should be happening.

After talking to Prof. Bahar, I started checking the bus accesses and filter cache hits. Since I wasn't sure where bus accesses were measured in the simulator code, I started tracing back through the simulator code starting with the statistics file. This lead me to into a lot of simulator code that I was completely unfamiliar with, and I ended up hitting some dead ends. I asked Cesare if he knew of any way to track where certain bus accesses were coming from. he suggested that I use a very basic benchmark and some print statements and trace through the execution. I spent most of Friday looking at instruction execution from the count benchmark. I ran the instructions through diff so I could see where the instructions differed. Something may be happening with the L1 cache, but I need to double check it.

Weekend

This weekend my parents came to visit! It was really nice to have them here. I showed them around campus on Friday night (or at least the quarter of the campus that I'm comfortable with.) On Saturday, we walked to a cafe called Meeting Street Cafe and each had a gigantic chocolate chip cookie for lunch. The cookies there are literally a little larger than the size of a small plate - I was barely able to finish mine! Soon after our walk to Meeting Street it started pouring, so we took the opportunity to go to the mall. On Saturday night we went out to dinner with my roommates. I had a really good time spending the weekend with my parents!