Getting Started

• Get the Sniper source code from our Download page

• Download a Pin or Pinplay kit from their respective sites.
  • The master branch of Sniper works with modern Pin versions (Pin 3.0+), while the pin2 branch works with older versions (Pin 2.14-71313). We recommend using a modern Pin 3 version if possible.
  • Sniper 7.2 has been tested with versions of Pin up to Pin-3.7 and Pinplay-3.5.
  • Extract Pin and symlink or rename to the pin_kit directory in Sniper's subdirectory: sniper/pin_kit
  • Set PIN_HOME to the location of Pin if you use a different directory or shared Pin location

• Install Option 1 - Docker Install
  • cd sniper/docker
  • make # build the Docker image
  • make run # starts running the Docker image
  • cd .. # return to the base Sniper directory (while running inside of Docker)

• Install Option 2 - Native install
  • sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386
  • sudo apt-get install binutils build-essential curl git libboost-dev libbz2-dev libc6:i386 libncurses5:i386 libsqlite3-dev libstdc++6:i386 python wget zlib1g-dev

• Compile Sniper. Some extra dependencies (a pre-compiled copy of the Python interpreter environment) will be downloaded automatically, so make sure you have a working internet connection when you make Sniper for the first time
  • make # or use 'make -j N' where N is the number of cores in your machine to use parallel make

• Running an application
  • cd test/fft; make run

Next steps

• Sniper configuration

• Porting applications to Sniper

• Obtaining more benchmarks

• Run multi-programmed workloads

• Accessing simulator hooks from inside an application

• Write scripts to monitor and control simulations

Prerequisites

• Modern Ubuntu version (16.04, 18.04, etc.)
• A recent Pin version (for example, Pin 3.5 or newer recommended)