Monday, November 29, 2010

Estimating CPU Speed

Factor contains a nice DSL for writing assembly code. I thought it would be fun to investigate how it works by accessing the CPU's Time Stamp Counter to estimate CPU speed.

The X86 instruction for accessing the timestamp value (incremented every CPU tick) is called RDTSC (a 2-byte instruction 0x0f 0x31). Some C code for calling the 32-bit or 64-bit versions of this looks like:

#if defined(__i386__)

static __inline__ unsigned long long rdtsc(void)
{
    unsigned long long int x;
    __asm__ __volatile__ (".byte 0x0f, 0x31" : "=A" (x));
    return x;
}

#elif defined(__x86_64__)

static __inline__ unsigned long long rdtsc(void)
{
    unsigned long long hi, lo;
    __asm__ __volatile__ ("rdtsc" : "=a"(lo), "=d"(hi));
    return ( (unsigned long long)lo)|( ((unsigned long long)hi)<<32 );
}

#endif

Factor provides utilities for calling arbitrary assembly code in the alien vocabulary. Using this, we can create corresponding Factor code (supporting both 32 and 64 bits):

USING: alien alien.c-types cpu.x86.assembler
cpu.x86.assembler.operands system ;

HOOK: rdtsc cpu ( -- n )

M: x86.32 rdtsc
    longlong { } cdecl [
        RDTSC
    ] alien-assembly ;

M: x86.64 rdtsc
    longlong { } cdecl [
        RAX 0 MOV
        RDTSC
        RDX 32 SHL
        RAX RDX OR
    ] alien-assembly ;

You can see in the implementation above how Factor uses the type of CPU (contained in the cpu variable) to dispatch on the correct version of the rdtsc word.

To estimate CPU speed, we will need to define two "benchmarking" words:

  1. Calculate the number of CPU ticks it takes to execute some Factor code.
  2. Calculate the time it takes to execute some Factor code.
USING: kernel math system ;

: #ticks ( quot -- n )
    rdtsc [ call rdtsc ] dip - ; inline

: #nanos ( quot -- n )
    nano-count [ call nano-count ] dip - ; inline

We can then create a "busy loop" that runs for some time, then estimates CPU speed as ticks-per-second:

: busy-loop ( -- )
    100000000 [ 1 - dup 0 > ] loop drop ;

: cpu-speed ( -- n )
    [ [ busy-loop ] #nanos ] #ticks swap / 1000000000.0 * ;

Running this on my MacBook Pro (with a 2.66 GHz processor) produces this estimate:

( scratchpad ) cpu-speed .
2660324566.190773

The rdtsc and #ticks words are distributed with Factor as instruction-count and count-instructions and are available in the cpu.x86.features vocabulary. The #nanos word is called benchmark and is available in the tools.time vocabulary.

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Github supports Factor!

I've been working with Github over the past three months to get Factor added as a recognized programming language. The main roadblock was proper syntax highlighting and deployment within the Github environment. Since Github uses the pygments project, I implemented (and contributed) a Factor lexer which will be part of the next release of pygments (version 1.4) and is available now on their development branch.

As of today, Github has officially added support for the Factor programming language. In celebration of this, I wanted to highlight some of the projects using Factor on Github. As you might know, I've been keeping code examples and tutorials from my blog posts on my Github.

The main repository (where a lot of the library development occurs) has 114 watches, 47 forks, and at least 17 unofficial copies.

There are a variety of other projects and tutorials:

Trixel (low resolution voxel renderer)

Implementation of Joy in Factor

Factor Blog Tutorial

99 Prolog Problems in Factor

Factor Training Ground

Sunlight Labs API in Factor

BERT in Factor

Static Blog Generator

Go implemented in Factor

Controlling a Robotino from Factor

Math and crypto code.

Sensors and Radar

Turtles, SVG, Image gadgets

Graphing gadgets

Facile: a CouchDB view server in Factor

Some patches (probably a little outdated):

New regexp minimalization code for Factor

Korean I/O support.

X input method

And, some related projects:

Packaging Factor for ArchLinux

Port of Factor to the Parrot Virtual Machine

If you know of other Factor projects with source code, let me know!

By the way, repositories get classified on push, so as the Factor projects get pushed to, they will be added to the list.