What is benefit of Pinball and pinpoint?

[Hamid Reza]

Hi all,

I found that benchmarks in form of pinball have been released. Could you tell me what is benefits of using benchmark's pinballs instead of original ones?

Thanks

[Trevor E. Carlson]

Reza,

The main benefit to using Pinballs are the reproducibility that it provides (and the compact representation with respect to SIFT traces). Starting with the whole-program pinballs, you can then create Pinpoints, which are Simpoint-based pinballs that represent the application. The good thing about these pinpoints are that they are derived from the original whole-program pinball, with the same memory access traces to the stack and heap, etc.

Trevor

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[Hamid Reza]

Hi,

Doesn't using pinball increase simulation speed?

thanks

[Trevor Carlson]

Hello,

     I am not sure if this will be the case. Pinballs themselves are actually running programs which are controlled on an instruction-by-instruction basis to make sure that the output is reproducible. The original application itself is still running, which costs some execution time. The SIFT traces might be faster because it isn't running an application directly, but instead streaming a collection of dynamic instruction packets. The cost for using SIFT traces is the extra overhead for storing the traces to disk, as they can be larger than Pinballs. (The size of SIFT traces is a function of the number of dynamic instructions contained in the trace. The size of a Pinball is a function of the binary size and input and injected data size)

Trevor

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[Wim Heirman]

Hamid,

One case where you do see (significantly) higher speed is while fast-forwarding when using Pinballs, this can happen at near-native speed while fast-forwarding through a SIFT trace still needs to read all instructions from disk which is significantly slower. The same holds for cache-only mode (although the difference is less extreme). During detailed simulation, the timing simulation itself is actually the slowest component so you shouldn't see much difference there.

Regards,

Wim