Extra Credit Homework

1. Extra Credit Homework • Use the unified parallel simulator to answer the following questions. Write out your answer and give supporting data that justifies your conclusion. • A computer vendor is developing their next generation high-performance workstation architecture. They need a machine with 256 processing elements. There are two chips on the market that they are considering as building blocks: • Vendor X: has a 1Ghz processor with 4 pipelines with 8 stages per pipeline. The vendor claims that with ordinary workloads: • the probability of pipeline flushes is .01 • The probability of pipeline stalls is .02 • Because of the large and efficient cache, the probability of acceptance of requests is good: between 95.00-99.99% • Vendor Y: has a 1Ghz processor with 8 pipelines with 8 stages each • Flush probability is .01 • Stall probability is .02 • With more chip real-estate dedicated to pipelines, there is less cache, resulting in a PA of 92.00-98.00%

2. The architects have not yet decided whether the architecture should be clustered or not. • The parallel percent of the expected workload is 99.0% • All other values are defaults Part A: Use the simulator to explore the possibilities, and determine what architecture performs best for both vendor processors, and which performs best overall. Include your data runs to support your conclusions. Explain the patterns and changes you see in the data. Part B: If the workload consists of exactly 4 processes of 1000 instructions per process, how does that limit the number of possible architectures to evaluate, and which one performs best.