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Thoughts about Archiving Experimental Computer Science Artifacts (including Experiments). Jack W. Davidson Department of Computer Science University of Virginia. Platforms. Good News Fewer architectures in the desktop high-performance area X86, PowerPC Hardware performance counters
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Thoughts about Archiving Experimental Computer Science Artifacts (including Experiments) Jack W. DavidsonDepartment of Computer Science University of Virginia
Platforms • Good News • Fewer architectures in the desktop high-performance area • X86, PowerPC • Hardware performance counters • Fewer operating systems • Linux, Windows • Accessible software infrastructures • gcc, llvm, jikes, openjdk, etc. • Available benchmark suites • SPEC, DaCapo, Parsec, etc.
Platforms • Bad News • Rapid changes in microarchitecture • Same ISA, but very different microarchitecture • Hardware performance counters are often not documented correctly • GPUs becoming important • Still lots of embedded architectures—although ARM seems to be becoming dominant • All Linuxes are not the same
Platforms • Bad News • Existing software infrastructures are sometimes impediments to experimentation • Cloud computing and public queue systems make controlling the environment difficult • Push to lock-down configurations because of security concerns • Embedded benchmarks, especially hard real-time benchmarks, are difficult to obtain because of proprietary concerns
Virtual Machines • Good News • Virtual machines allow entire platforms (OS, software tools, etc) to be packaged and delivered • Very useful in security research where exploits are very fragile • Bad News • Hides machine details (not working on bare metal) • Longevity of VM images an issue • Licensing issues with Windows
Final Thoughts • Education • Most graduate students don’t know how to do experimental computer science • Hard to teach—only learn by doing • Can we create a course that teaches fundamental concepts? • Incentives • Need good incentives for archiving • Can be in conflict with faculty entrepreneurs