Exercise 4 - Platform to explore parallelism

General Information

Exercise Tips

Motivation

Objectives

This exercise will be divided into parts and, at the end of them, you should be able to:

Contextualization

Attention: All the files you need for this activity are available at / home / staff / rodolfo / mc723 / download.

Part 1 - Creating a multicore platform

The description of this part is very simple: take the platform from the previous exercise and make it work with two processors. For this, create a new platform with the name dual_mips and assemble the rest of the necessary structure.

It is important that you already create an interconnection structure this time (although it is not strictly necessary in this exercise, it will be easier if you do it and it will also help you in the work ).

Describe your project decisions. I will be available on lab days to discuss possible design decisions and how to implement them.

Create a program, however simple, that takes advantage of its parallel platform. What is the simulator's performance?

Part 2 - Scalability

How scalable is your platform? Can you make a 4-color version? 8 colors? Do them and run your program. Evaluate the simulator's performance.

Prepare the 8-color version for delivery. To do this, run the following commands:

make distclean
arp --pack octo_mips

The commands above are assuming that your platform is already configured and that the chosen name was octo_mips. A file called octo_mips.arppack will be created. You should not send this file, just keep it for a possible demonstration (I will select some students for demonstration).

Delivery

Submit a report of at most 2 pages, describing the activity performed and the results obtained.