Dual PipeTrace Viewer
Project
The Dual PipeTrace Viewer (dptv) is a processor pipeline event visualization tool. A processor simulator will record pipeline events, and generate a trace file. The dptv viewer tool is written in C, using the SDL2 graphical package. dptv will display the pipeline events in a pipeline timing diagram, such that the user can easily zoom and pan to navigate the dynamic instruction steam. Similar tools have been developed and published in prior literature. The key feature, not found in any other tools, is the ability to display two traces such that the same benchmark has been simulated on different processor configurations, even if the two configurations operate at different clock frequencies. dptv therefore makes it much easier to compare performance trade-offs when exploring architectural alternatives.
Team
Adam Grunwald, bachelor student of computer science with embedded systems emphasis
Phuong Nguyen, masters graduate of computer science and softare engineering
Elliott Forbes, professor of computer science & computer engineering
Publications
Grunwald, A., Nguyen, P. and Forbes, E., "dptv: A New PipeTrace Viewer for Microarchitectural Analysis," Proceedings of the 55th Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, March 2023. [pdf]
Presentations
Midwest Instruction and Computing Symposium, 2023. [pdf coming soon]
Demos
The first video shows a comparison of two traces of the same benchmark, where one trace is executed on a two-wide processor (blue), and the other on a four-wide processor (purple). Both processors are operating at the same frequency.
The second video shows the same two traces, but this time representing a clock frequency for the four-wide that is three times slower than the clock frequency of the two-wide.
Status
dptv development is still currently in progress. The viewer is easily able to visualize large traces, on the order of hundreds of thousands, up to millions of dynamic instructions. The code base is mature and stable, however work must still be done to integrate into a wider variety of processor simulators.
Source code will be available soon, and will be released under the GPLv3 open source license. If you use dptv in your own research, please consider citing our MICS paper above. And if you find dptv helpful, please let me know - I'd like to have a rough idea of how many people have tried it. And finally, if you have any critical bug reports, just email me and let me know.