An architectural research facility: ISP descriptions, simulation, data collection

ABSTRACT

The objectives of this paper are twofold. In the first place we discuss some issues related to the formal description of computer systems and how these issues were handled in a specific project, the selection of a standard computer architecture for the Army/Navy Computer Family Architecture (CFA) project. The second purpose is to present a methodology for automatically gathering architectural data which can be used for evaluation and comparison purposes. We will not discuss the rationale behind the selection of specific test programs and the statisical experiment set up to ascertain the influence of the programmers, the test programs, and the machine architecture on the results. These issues and the actual results of the experiment belong in a companion paper.

Formal descriptions of three candidate architectures (IBM S/370, Interdata 8/32 and DEC PDP-11) were written in ISP, a computer description language. The ISP descriptions of the three architectures were used to simulate the execution of assembly language test programs. The measurements collected during the program simulations were stored into a data base for post-processing. Automating the data collection process not only eliminated tedious and potentially error prone hand calculations, but also provided the means to gather information about dynamic program behavior, information that would be almost impossible to calculate manually.

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