[Gems-users] Checkpoints

[Edward Lee <edwl202@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear GEMS users,

I am planning to do some tests for a ccNUMA multi-CMP system. And I think GEMS is a good choice for that. So, I acquired Simics+GEMS and installed them. It was suggested that I should use Simics 2.2.19 for the naked-checkpoint scripts to work. However, SIMICS dropped 2.x from their repositories also they do not issue licenses for that as well. They gave us a license for Simics 3.X only. Then, I went and created my own checkpoints from Serengeti/abisko target. And my questions are to verify this process as it has not been discussed earlier as far as I checked. And I pretty much tried to read naked-check-create.sh and system.conf to come up with my own checkpoints. Although my questions might be a little more SIMICS related but I thought this group would have better answers as somebody should have done these stages earlier. 

1. I assume there is no difference between sarek and abisko from GEMS point of view. I mean we can use both. Is that right?

2. Since number of processors and memory are the main inputs to the script, I started with them. As far as I know, number of cpus is not hot-pluggable so you cannot change the number of processors after you boot a machine. Is this the case for memory as well?  

3. I checked the target guide for serengeti and accordingly, I set the following parameters in abisko-common.simics

    - $os

    - $num_cpus

$disk_size was same with the one used in the script so I left it as it is. However, I do not know how to setup disk_{cylinders,heads,tracks} which were set to some numbers in the script, as I couldn't see any match in the guide. Any ideas on this?

4. Same question for memory, it looks like the second parameter represents the entire memory. How can I specify that in the abisko-common.simics? I only see $megs_per_cpu, so let's say for a 16 processor machine should I basically divide that to 16 and set it for $megs_per_cpu? Would that be consistent with what Ruby is looking for?

Am I missing anything to start my runs with GEMS? Sorry for the long e-mail and I also apologize if I am trying to ask anything obvious.

Any help is appreciated.

Regards,

/edwl