Yuan Yao

Yuan Yao

Assistant Professor
Computer Science
Research group UART
Uppsala University, Sweden

Statically-linked PARSEC-3.0 benchmarks

Date:

In this project I modified PARSEC-3.0 benchmarks using static linking with gem5 hooks for the x86_64 architecture.

Github link for the project

The PARSEC (Princeton Application Repository for Shared-Memory Computers) benchmark suite, developed by Princeton University, is a comprehensive collection of over 13 parallel applications representing a variety of emerging workloads. These applications are multithreaded using one or more of the following programming models: Pthreads, OpenMP, and Intel TBB.
To see which applications support which programming models, refer to the overview table on PARSEC’s Wiki page.

Project Overview

In this project, I have ported the PARSEC-3.0 workloads to static linking for execution in gem5.

Why Static Linking?

Static linking allows all the necessary libraries to be included in the binary. This approach preserves call stack information in the .eh_frame section, which is critical for backtracing the application call stack in gem5.
Without static linking, backtracing becomes challenging, especially in a full-system simulation environment, where memory-mapping information resides in the simulated OS’s memory space.

My Contribution

The primary contribution can be found in the following commit: 0f6bf13.

Challenges Overcome

While the ideal approach is to use the -static flag during compilation and linking with GCC, practical issues arise due to the following reasons:

  • Different PARSEC benchmarks depend on various external libraries.
  • These libraries use different build systems and dependencies.
  • Some benchmarks have corner cases in their .ctor sections that require manual construction when using static linking.

How to Use the New Binaries

  1. Run git clone https://github.com/winterNan/gem5-parsec
  2. Run install.sh located in the root folder of the project.
  3. Update the script by replacing your_root_pwd with your actual sudo password.

Once these steps are completed, the new binaries should be ready for use in gem5.

Previous Works on Static PARSEC

There have been previous efforts to compile PARSEC-2.1 with static linking, which can be found here. However, these efforts have certain limitations:

  • The PARSEC version used is outdated (PARSEC-2.1).
  • The target binaries were specifically prepared for the Alpha-21364 architecture, which is no longer widely used.

Despite these limitations, I acknowledge that this previous work provided valuable insights and inspiration for my own efforts in porting PARSEC-3.0 to static linking for gem5.