An interactive, visual simulator for the DLX pipeline

Abstract

We have built an interactive, visual pipeline simulator, called dlxview, for the DLX instruction set and pipeline described in Computer Architecture A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson [1]. This software provides animated versions of key figures and tables from the text and allows the user to readily follow details of pipeline activity as a code is simulated, to vary pipeline implementation, and to compare performance across different pipeline designs. The software package requires a system running Unix and X11, with Tcl/Tk installed, and using the GNU gcc compiler is recommended. A 256 color display with 1024x768 pixels is best for display, due to the detailed diagrams of the DLX pipeline. The software has been designed to run on a variety of platforms and has been tested on Solaris 2.3, SunOS 4.1.1, HP-UX 9.0, DEC OSF/1 4.0, and Linux kernel 1.2.1. DLXview is available at http://yara.ecn.purdue.edu/~teamaaa/dlxview/