15-740 Fall '97
Notes on Assignments

In the following, the term HOME740 refers to the home directory for the course, namely /afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15740-f97/public.

The following information is in reverse order of assignment, i.e., the most recent assignment appears firsrt.

Assignment 6

Assignment 6 will be handed out in three parts. All parts are due on the last day of class: Friday, December 5. They are as follows:

Assignment 5

Assignment 5 will be handed out in two parts. Both parts are due on Monday, November 17. The first part is available in Postscript. The second part is available as a separate document in Postscript.

Assignment 4

Assignment 4 will be handed out in two parts. Both parts are due on Monday, November 3. The first part, on memory system performance is available in Postscript. The second part is available as a separate document in Postscript.

For measuring memory system performance, it is useful to express performance in units of clock cycles per word transferred.

For measuring disk performance, it is important to measure ``wall'' time (i.e., the time you'd measure by looking at a clock on the wall), rather than user CPU time. Otherwise, you'll get unrealistically short timings, since CPU time doesn't count the time your process cannot proceed waiting for a disk access. A special version of the ftime package has been created for this. The files ftime.h and ftime.c in the assignment directory define a function fwtime to provide this timing information.

Assignment 3

Assignment 3 was handed out on Monday, October 6. It is due on Friday, October 17. The assignment document is available in Postscript.

You will want to copy the file csr.tar in the directory HOME740/asst/asst3 into your local directory and ``untar'' it using the command
tar xvf files.tar.

You will need to select a platform to tune your code for. For each of the following possibilities, an article is available giving an overview of the internal architecture. Each of these is available in both Postscript (.ps) and Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) form. Out of deference to their copyrights, there is no direct link to them from any WWW page. Instead you should retrieve them from the directory HOME740/platform.

Here is more Information on Publicly-Available Machines

Important Change. Announced on October 10. In the original assignment, you were asked to report your code performance for just one set of experimental parameters. Instead, report it for the following:

Assignment 2

Assignment 2 was handed out Wed., September 24 and is due on Monday, Oct. 6. This is one of the more difficult assignments of the course, so get started early! The assignment document is available in:

Working executable version of the simulator are available as follows:

You will want to copy the file files.tar in the directory HOME740/asst/asst2 into your local directory and ``untar'' it using the command
tar xvf files.tar.

Getting the GUI version of the simulator running requires compiling and linking the Tcl/Tk code libraries. Try find a machine with these libraries installed. In one machine I tried, the libraries were installed in /usr/local/lib, but the files tk.h and tcl.h were nowhere to be found. So, I put copies of them in the class include directory. Here would be the proper incantation:
make mips_tk INC=-I/afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15740-f97/public/include

Note, however, that this works only if the installed libraries are the same version as the include files.

Assignment 1

Assignment 1 was issued on Sept. 15 and due on Wed., Sept. 24. A copy of the assignment is available in postscript format.

The files you need for this assignment can be found in the directory /afs/cs.cmu.edu/academic/class/15740-F97/public/asst/asst1/.

The following document, retrieved from the MIPS WWW site. describes the MIPS instruction set. It describes 4 generations of the instruction set definition, labeled I through IV. For this course, we will stick with the original (MIPS I) version:

Note that, contrary to the directions in the course syllabus, we require only one written solution for each project group. Clearly indicate the names of all group members on this document.