Earlier this month, we reported programmer Jon Rocatis aka Rockets had released a Cell/SPU Pipeline Viewer, Sputnik. An extremely helpful tool for developers, this can be used in troubleshooting and improving low level code, as well as assisting us in figuring out the CELL/SPU(See Image) when you are having problems. With this update, the author has 'cleaned up' his project, and brought it to everyone by releasing it open source. Stop by his project home to check out this new tool at bitbucket.org, linked at the bottom of this article.
README:
Sputnik is a Cell/SPU Pipeline viewer. According to Wikipedia Sputnik means “co-traveler” or “traveling companion” and I hope Sputnik will be accompanying you on your future SPU coding adventures!
It’s somewhat of a clone of IBM’s spusim tool. That tool has some things that annoy me and is lacking some features that I would like, so I ended up writing my own!
First of all spusim locks the files you have loaded which is annoying – also it has no recent-files or anything like that. Sputnik has that and will even auto-load the most recently opened file at start up and go to the function you looked at last. Sputnik is able to load both object files and ELF-files.
Sputnik also has a lot of statistics regarding the schedule so you can easily get an idea about the performance and potential of your loops. It also shows you lots of register stats that can be helpful to judge if you have enough registers for unrolling.
Right now scheduling does not cross blocks which I believe is different from how spusim does it. Sometimes that causes spusim to show a stall going into a loop and then that stall becomes part of the loop which is not right either. Since the focus of Sputnik is to analyze loops I think it is better doing it my way. That said, Sputnik does not schedule from bottom of the loop through the branch itself. I’m not sure to visualize this anyway – if you have any ideas, let me know
Big thanks to ida-spu project (http://code.google.com/p/ida-spu). I extended that code for the disassembler in Sputnik and it saved me lots of work.
This is a Qt application (Qt - Cross-platform application and UI framework — Qt - A cross-platform application and UI framework). You might need the Qt runtime libs for Windows. Download Qt, the cross-platform application framework — Qt - A cross-platform application and UI framework
TODO:
* Double precision stalls are not handled.
* Need to do something with branches. I’m not sure what.
* Saving of which function you looked at last doesn’t really work.
* Search
* Bugs!
* Headers for symbol and section windows are not saved - I have no clue why not.
* Schedule part of GUI really wants to resize all the time.
Project Homebitbucket.org/rockets/sputnik/wiki/Home
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