MIPT-MIPS

MIPT-MIPS is a pre-silicon simulator of MIPS CPU. It measures performance of program running on CPU, thus taking best features of RTL and common functional simulation:

• Precision. We provide cycle-accurate models of branch prediction unit and pipeline behavior.
• Customization. Cache size, branch prediction algorithms, and other parameters can be easily changed.
• Simplicity. Our source files are much more readable than RTL.
• Speed. Simulation frequency gets up to 0.7 MHz on i5-7300U.

MIPT-MIPS can be used for different purposes:

• Performance control of software optimizations: you may check IPC boosts of your programs
• Pathfinding of hardware optimizations: you may easily integrate some nice feature to CPU model
• Education: simulator is a nice experimental frog to study CPU internals

Features modeled:

• Configurable branch prediction unit with 5 prediction algorithms
• Configurable instruction cache with true-LRU policy
• Interstage data bypassing

More details about internals are available on Wiki

Requirements

MIPT-MIPS uses C++17 features and Boost 1.61. Thus, you have to use compilers of these versions or newer:

• GCC 7
• Clang 5.0
• Apple LLVM 7.3.0
• MS Visual Studio 2017 (Boost 1.66 and CMake 3.10.2 are required)

Install Boost before building the project.

To work with MIPS traces, you need to install MIPS binutils. Please follow our manual if you are using Linux, OS X, or Windows.

MIPT-MIPS build system is CMake. You should install CMake 3.9 or higher. Check our Wiki page to get more details about CMake. Users of IDE (Visual Studio, Eclipse, CodeBlocks etc.) may generate project files with CMake as well.

Workflow on Linux

Clone

1. Check that your environment meets all the requirements above.
2. Clone repository with submodules: git clone --recursive https://github.com/MIPT-ILab/mipt-mips.git

Build

1. Go to traces subdirectory and build MIPS traces just by typing make
2. Create a new build directory somewhere, then cd into it: mkdir /path/to/your/build/directory
3. Go to the build directory: cd /path/to/your/build/directory
4. Run cmake /path/to/mipt-mips/simulator to configure CMake
5. Run make to get the mipt-mips binary file
6. If you changed some source code files, just type make to rebuild project

Run

1. Now you can run simulation: ./mipt-mips -b /path/to/mipt-mips/traces/<tracename>.out
2. See more command line options in the paragraph below

Test

1. To run all unit tests, call make unit-tests && ctest --verbose -C Release from your build directory.

Command line options

Basic options

• -I — modeled ISA, default option is "mips32"
• -b <filename> — provide path to ELF binary file to execute.
• -n <number> — number of instructions to run. If omitted, simulation continues until halting system call or jump to null is executed.
• -f — enables functional simulation only
• -d — enables detailed output of each cycle

Performance mode options

Branch prediction

• --bp-mode — prediction mode. Check supported modes in manual.
• --bp-size — branch prediction cache size (amount of tracked branch instructions)
• --bp-ways — # of ways in branch prediction cache

Instruction cache

• --icache-size — instruction cache size in bytes
• --icache-ways — # of ways in instruction cache
• --icache-line-size — line size of instruction cache

Complex pipeline

• --complex-alu-latency - number of execution stages required for complex arithmetic instructions to be complete

About MIPT-MIPS

This project is a part of ILab activity at Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).

The main goal of the project is to teach the students the computer architecture through development of a microprocessor implementing the MIPS instruction set in both functional and performance simulators.

May I contribute?

Yes, if you attend MIPT-MIPS lectures. See our contributing.md file for details.