Author Archives: rustam

About rustam

Computer architecture graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin.

Making EZProxy easier

Posted on 06/13/2014 by rustam

Graduate students like me read lots of research papers. Not all research papers are available for free download online—yet—so we have to access them through our university’s EZProxy gateway. I made a simple bookmark that makes reading papers with EZProxy … Continue reading →

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Memory-centric microarchitecture visualization

Posted on 08/14/2013 by rustam

Visualization is a key part of microarchitectural analysis. Visualization is necessary because even the simplest in-order processor is incredibly complex; its performance may be affected by cache misses, branch mispredictions, pipeline stalls, DRAM contention, inaccurate prefetching, and so on. In … Continue reading →

Posted in Simulation, Visualization | Leave a comment

Why TAGE is the best

Posted on 06/30/2013 by rustam

The TAGE branch predictor by André Seznec and Pierre Michaud is the best branch predictor today, winning the last two branch predictor competitions (CBP2 and CBP3). It was introduced in a 2006 paper: A case for (partially) tagged Geometric History … Continue reading →

Posted in Branch Prediction, Papers | 3 Comments

About Me

Posted on 06/10/2013 by rustam

I am a computer architecture Ph.D. student at The University of Texas at Austin. This is my blog about computer architecture. I also have a regular academic website with my publications and other academic info.

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Paper: A Model for Hierarchical Memory

Posted on 06/09/2013 by rustam

Asymptotic complexity of algorithms (the “big-O” notation) is a staple of computer science and engineering. We usually focus on asymptotic worst-case time complexity. For example, we know that quicksort can take up to n2 steps to sort a sequence of … Continue reading →

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Frequency scaling for simulator debugging

Posted on 06/09/2013 by rustam

While working on a recent paper, I stumbled on an easy way to find errors in a computer architecture simulator. I simulated a processor at various frequencies and plotted the resulting performance. I expected to see a nice “smooth” set of points, perhaps … Continue reading →

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