README for Heo

Heo README

This README briefly describes what Heo is and how to setup & run Heo.

License Information

Copyright (c) 2010-2019 by Min Cai (min.cai.china@bjut.edu.cn)

This program is free software, licensed under the MIT license.

About

Heo is a cycle-accurate multicore architectural simulator.

Heo is written in Go.

Key Features

• Heo facilitates interface-based hierarchical object orientation to improve code readability and extensibility.

• Heo provides functional architectural simulation of:

  • Program loading for statically-linked MIPS32 ELF executables (both Little Endian and Big Endian are supported);
  • Functional execution of common integer and floating-point instructions of MIPS32 ISA;
  • Emulation of common POSIX system calls;
  • Execution of Pthreads based multithreaded programs.

• Heo provides cycle-accurate microarchitectural simulation of:

  • Separate pipeline structures such as the reorder buffer, separate integer and floating point physical register files;
  • Explicit register renaming based on the merged architectural and rename register file model;
  • Single-threaded superscalar out-of-order execution, multithreaded SMT and CMP execution model;
  • Multi-level inclusive cache hierarchy with the directory-based MESI coherence protocol;
  • Simple cycle-accurate DRAM controller model;
  • Various kinds of static and dynamic branch predictors, checkpointing-based pipeline recovery on branch misprediction (with bugs).

• Heo supports the following unclassified simulation features:

  • Support measurement of instructions, pipeline structures and the memory hierarchy;
  • Support generation of instruction traces;
  • Support both execution-driven and trace-driven NoC subsystem simulation;
  • Support seamless switching between functional simulation and performance simulation mode;
  • Support the thread based data prefetching scheme: classification of good, bad and ugly prefetch requests.

• Heo provides the following common infrastructure:

  • Scheduling and dispatching framework for modeling synchronous (cycle accurate) and asynchronous activities;
  • Easy configuration and statistics reporting of the simulated architectures, workloads and simulations.

• Heo currently supports correct execution of all the Olden benchmark suite except incorrect output from "health", plus some of CPU2006 benchmarks. Other benchmarks are being tested.

TODOs

1. Support CPU2006, PARSEC and Rodinia.

2. Support CPU-GPU heterogeneous multicore architectures.

3. Support CPU frequency control (multiple clock domain).

4. Support DRAM-NVM hybrid memory systems.

5. Support Command line options and component properties.

6. Support multiple hardware prefetchers.

7. Support application of machine learning algorithms in architectural components.

Dependencies

1. sudo apt-get install python3-pip python3-tk

2. pip3 install --upgrade pip

3. pip3 install matplotlib pandas seaborn objectpath

System Requirements

Heo has been developed and tested on 64-bit MacOS 10.15 Beta with go 1.12.5.

For developing and running Heo, make sure that:

1. You have the latest versions of Linux distributions or Mac OS installed;

2. You have the latest versions of Golang compiler installed.

Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/mcai/heo

Customizing Heo for Your Needs

• As is always true for open source software, the existing Heo code are good examples for demonstrating its usage and power.

Contact

Please report bugs and send suggestions to:

Min Cai (min.cai.china@bjut.edu.cn)

Faculty of Information Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China