A Two-tiered Modeling Framework for Undergraduate Computer Architecture Courses

We describe a new methodology for modelling key microarchitectural features in an advanced undergraduate computer architecture course and demonstrate the specific application of this methodology to branch predictors. The proposed approach consists of two separate, but synergistic programming assignments. In the first part, students implement the branch prediction logic as an independent software module, but the interfaces are defined in such a way that the developed code can be easily integrated into a cycle-accurate simulator. In the second part, such integration into the M-Sim simulator takes place. Such decoupling allows the students to focus on the features of the branch predictor in isolation from rather complex simulator code. In addition, the two-stage process also better aligns itself with the class schedule, because the students are only exposed to the simulator code at the end of the semester, after they learned most of the key design concepts that are supported in the simulator. In this paper, we present the details of both assignments and also describe the modifications introduced to the M-Sim simulator to support such modelling capabilities. All assignments and the modified simulator are available online and the framework has already been used in the undergraduate computer architecture course at SUNY Binghamton. Finally, the proposed framework can be easily extended for modelling other key architectural paradigms, such as register renaming and caches.