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iRCCE-FLAIR.tar

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 12:30:22 GMT

User's Manual for iRCCE: A Non-blocking Communication Extension to RCCE

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 15:34:23 GMT

BareMichael baremetal framework

webadmin@intel.com — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 04:26:49 GMT

BareMichael is a minimalistic, open source baremetal framework for launching your C and/or assembly code on the SCC. There is just enough code to get each core into 32-bit protected mode with cache enabled, and then jump to your code. Also included are a subset of the standard C library and a pseudo-terminal program (called MikeTerm) for displaying output from your SCC programs.

As this is a minimalistic framework, there is no built-in API for message passing, nor any typical OS features such as process/thread abstractions, but there is a good amount of groundwork laid to allow one to design and add in these or other features as needed.

The latest version can be downloaded from:

http://marcbug.scc-dc.com/svn/repository/trunk/baremetal/baremichael/tarballs/

Please see the README (included in the download) for more information.

SCC Thermal Calibration Software

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:43:05 GMT

The released SCC Thermal Calibration Software contains a framework to generate the thermal sensors calibration coefficients and an analytical power model of the SCC chip. This framework is composed by a set of bash and python scripts, c-codes and kernel modules that stresses the different cores of SCC with synthetic benchmarks and collect the core activity/ power and temperature sensor outputs. These values are then used in a least square problem to find the calibration coefficient for each thermal sensor and in a non-linear least square problem to find the coefficient of an analytic model that relates the core activity (measured through the performance counters ) and the power consumption of each SCC core. This release reflects the work presented by the authors in the following two papers:

Bartolini, A.; Sadri, M.; Beneventi, F.; Cacciari, M.; Tilli, A.; Benini, L.; , “A System Level Approach to Multi-core Thermal Sensors Calibration,” 21st International Workshop, PATMOS 2011, Madrid, Spain, Sept. 2011,pp 22-31.

Sadri, M.; Bartolini, A.; Benini, L.; , “Single-Chip Cloud Computer thermal model,” International Workshop on Thermal Investigations of ICs and Systems (THERMINIC), 2011 17th, pp.1-6, 27-29 Sept. 2011

As many of you may know the SCC thermal sensors are not calibrated and the values they generates are in principle dependent by temperature, voltage and process variation. From some discussion on the forum, the sensor value (SV) is in first approximation linearly dependent on the temperature, thus the thermal calibration procedure must give the coefficient of the linear relationship for the different sensors. In University of Bologna we designed an automated procedure for generating this calibration parameter by measuring the sensors values at different frequencies and different computational loads and resolving a least square problem. Using the same dataset it is possible to generate also the analytical power model of the SCC device. To get consistent results the calibration procedure takes time, expect around 24h of trace-collection in the default configuration. This operation is done once to obtain the values of he calibration constants, that will be used at run-time to transform the sensor values in °C.

In the latest months we worked in cleaning up our scripts and making a consistent release of these software, that was original a set of Matlab and bash scripts and now are a set of python and bash ones. We believe that this procedure, even if still be not 100% stable and validated (some artifact are present on the calibrated sensors) can enable the usage of the thermal sensors on SCC opening new research direction. As consequence of that we want to release it to the marc community. We also believe that some exiting research can be conducted on analyzing the datasets produced by the calibration routines (power, SV , voltages and ambient temperature) by different SCC platforms.

Indeed we can correlate the artifacts we see on our SCC device with the other one, and moreover we can analyze if the same sensor on different device has the same behavior or not. This allows us to generate a first experimental variability dataset and model that. For this reason we set up an FTP server in our institution in which we would like to collect the results, analyze and publish them. Thus we would like to ask the user that uses our calibration sensor framework and power modeling results to send its calibration dataset. To automate this procedure we embed in the calibration scripts the FTP upload procedure. We gave the freedom to every user to skip this step, but we encourage you in doing it.

To let the cores temperature being more usable we also had modified the SCC power meter GUI to report at runtime the core temperatures, and we believe this can be helpful to the final user to enable temperature-aware research topic. To spread the software we add a BSD license to the software we release. The software is based on SCCKit 1.4.2 but can be easily used in the latest SCCKit since we release all the source files.

The software can be downloaded by the following link http://www-micrel.deis.unibo.it/~bartolini/SCCsoftware
Please refer to the README file included in the download for more details and installation procedure.

Andrea

RCKMPI and RCCE

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 11:54:31 GMT

Hello everybody,

I would like to ask a question, and it seems very primary, but that because I'm very new in programmin SCC.

When I use RCKMPI form programming SCC, and when it is better to use RCCE ?

In other words, I need to know the different usage of both: RCKMPI and RCCE ?

Also Can I add RCKMPI to visual Studio, to help me writting my programs of SCC , of course not debugging, ....

Thanks in advance

rckmpi for Visual Studio

webadmin@intel.com — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 10:20:19 GMT

Hello everybody,

I'm a beginner in programming SCC. I'm trying to program it using visual studio. I've already installed WinGDB for remote debugging.

I succeeded in compiling a simple "hello world" application on the mcpc using visual studio.

Now I want to download rckmpi library for visual studio ,, so could you help me , how I do it ?

Thanks in advance

sccUART

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 19:08:04 GMT

Dear MARC community,

While running bare metal applications, we faced the problem of getting

debug information from cores to the MCPC.

The sccGui shows data send from the SCC via pseudo UART, but

lacks the possibility of logging into files.

Furthermore, using the GUI with our remote access from Germany

is not much fun.

Since everything else in our build chain can be done from a terminal,

we implemented a new command line tool: sccUART.

It is designed to run on the host pc and captures all

characters that the SCC sends by calling out to either

0x2f8 or 0x3f8.

Once a core send 80 characters or a newline char, this data, preceded

by the processor identifier, is printed.

This buffering data avoids a mixup of output from different cores.

Additionally, sccUART can create a file for each core's output.

Example invocation:

./sccUART -f log

Example output:

0: This is core 0.

Created files: log0, log1, …, log47

'tail -f log0' allows to track only rck00's output

Example asm code to run on SCC (nasm style)

; void __outprint(char c);

global __outprint

__outprint:

push ebp

mov ebp, esp ; save caller context

push edx

mov eax, [ebp+8] ; get parameter

mov edx, 0x2f8

out dx, al ; sent parameter to mcpc

pop edx

pop ebp

ret

The tool's implementation bases on sccGui and sccDump and,

thus, you need a qt installation for building it.

Unfortunately, qt is not part of the standard MCPC software and

we installed qt and its dependencies manually.

A document covering the required steps is included in our

package, but be warned: it may take up to a coffee pot.

As for now sccUART is not compatible with the linux serial

driver (aka /dev/ttyS0). This is work in progress. Feel free

to contribue.

For any questions regarding sccUART:

jana.traue(at)tu-cottbus.de

tpresche(at)informatik.tu-cottbus.de

ETI's SCC Development Framework Available

webadmin@intel.com — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 21:35:15 GMT

MARC community,

ETI has released a beta version of it's "SCC Development Framework". This framework will allow you to boot the chip in bare metal and jump to your user code. It leaves the chip in supervisor mode, so you have access to all aspects of the chip. It also includes the following features:
* A software development toolchain based on GNU binutils and gcc to compile C codes.
* Full libc support
* Debugging support
* A Linux simulation environment to develop codes and test on Linux without the need for an SCC chip.
* A launcher to run programs on SCC and communicate with cores on the device.
* A streaming API to communicate to/from any core .
* An MPI implementation that supports most of MPI 1.1 and some of MPI2.

If you are interested in beta-testing this framework, please email scc-support@etinternational.com for download instructions.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email scc-support@etinternational.com.

Sincerely,
ETI SCC Development Team.

TACO now available for the SCC

webadmin@intel.com — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 11:33:46 GMT

Dear MARC community,

TACO (Topologies and Collections) is a highly efficient distributed object platform, which is entirely based on C++ templates. TACO provides easily usable remote method invocation mechanisms as well as powerful object groups. Entire distributed groups of objects can be created, destroyed, selectively cloned and manipulated by various parallel collective operations. Thus programmers can treat entire object groups similarly to single objects.

The newest release supports the SCC as execution platform and uses the on-chip Message Passing Buffers for fast communication. More details are available in the tutorial https://idun.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~rrotta/tutorial.pdf. You can get the source code athttps://idun.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/~rrotta/taco-spring2011.zip

Current information will be available on https://idun.informatik.tu-cottbus.de/mcc/wiki/taco:start. Any questions related to TACO on the SCC should be sent to rrotta@informatik.tu-cottbus.de or posted in this forum.

iRCCE: A Non-blocking Communication Extension to RCCE (Update!)

webadmin@intel.com — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 13:11:57 GMT

Hello MARC Community,

Please find attached a TAR file of the updated iRCCE library (Version 1.2).

iRCCE is a non-blocking communication extension to the well-known RCCE communication library that extends RCCE by asynchronous message-passing functions (iRCCE_isend / iRCCE_irecv). Furthermore, iRCCE also improves the performance of some RCCE functions, as for example the blocking send/receive operations.

As a recent extension, iRCCE now also supports wildcards for message length (iRCCE_ANY_LENGTH) and source parameter (iRCCE_ANY_SOURCE) when calling a receive function. However, this feature is still beta. So if you see something not working, feel free to email us!

You can find a detailed documentation as a PDF file within the TAR package in the doc folder.

Please do not hesitate to contact us in case of any problems, questions or ideas for improvements.

Carsten Clauss, Stefan Lankes
http://www.lfbs.rwth-aachen.de
Chair for Operating Systems
RWTH Aachen University