Due by 5 PM, Monday Dec. 8, 1997
1. Using the information in the handout, draw a picture of the MIPS R10000 TLB and Primary Data Cache at about the level of detail of Figure 7.25 from the textbook. Be sure to label and specify the widths of all fields. If there's something you can't figure out from the documents, make (and write down) some reasonable assumption.
2. (Chapter 9 reading required.) Parallel systems usually show performance increases as you increase the number of processors, with the ideal being n times speedup for n processors. Please invent a small ``benchmark'' that runs slower if you add more processors. That is, the execution time of your benchmark should have some inverse relationship to the number of processors. Assume the system is a single-bus, shared-memory MIMD computer.
No cheap tricks allowed, like inserting artificial delays that depend on n, or passing the entire computation from one processor to the next so that only one processor is active at a time. Your benchmark should actually compute something meaningful, and it should display the slowdown behavior for small values of n like 5 or 10 or 100 rather than have some asymptotic slowdown! Make whatever reasonable assumptions you need to about the system. You can write a little C program or write MIPS code, whatever you like. Explain the reason(s) for the slowdown. Hints: try using ``false sharing'' or an algorithm that has extraordinary inter-processor communication needs.