McPAT

Sniper integrates the McPAT (Multicore Power, Area, and Timing) framework for power and area modeling for of manycore architectures. The version of McPAT that is installed with Sniper is based on McPAT (available from HP), with the patches listed below for increased performance and functionality.

Sniper 5.3 and newer

Sniper 5.3 upgraded McPAT support to version 1.0. This McPAT version natively supports per-core voltages, removing the need for the Core voltage override patch.

• CACTI results cache sniper-mcpat-1.0.patch Caches results from the CACTI cache model in a BerkeleyDB database for McPAT 1.0.

Sniper 5.2 and before

Up to Sniper 5.2, McPAT version 0.8 was used in combination with the patches below:

• Core voltage override vdd.patch Adds a system/vdd XML parameter to override the core voltage, which is normally hardcoded based on the technology node. This patch is useful for doing DVFS-related research.

• CACTI results cache cache-cacti.patch Caches results from the CACTI cache model in a BerkeleyDB database. CACTI's runtime is by far the largest component of the runtime of McPAT, even though its results only depend on the architecture definition but not on application-specific usage statistics (e.g. simulated cache hit rates). This patch allows CACTI's results to be reused across McPAT invocations, significantly reducing its runtime.

• A combined patch with both the of the above voltage override and CACTI results cache (along with a GCC 4.6 error fix) cache-cacti+vdd+gcc46.patch