Instructions for Setting up and Using Mambo (AKA IBM Cell BE Simulator)

1. Goto IBM's website - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/pkgdownloads.html?S_TACT=105AGX16 and download SDK 3.0 Developer Package and Extras Package. (If you are planning to use Ubuntu or any Debian based distro, download the Fedora Package)
2. OS's
- If you use Fedora/Redhat EL, follow IBM's installation instructions given on same Webpage.
- If you use Ubuntu/Debian distro, go to Mike Arthurs page: http://mikearthur.co.uk/?p=167 and follow instructions
- If you use Windows, you will need to either install Fedora/Ubuntu or get a virtual machine in order to install Mambo.

Few Notes:
-You will need a tcl/tk package for running Mambo. If simulator complains that it cannot load tcl/tk shared libraries, check if you have installed tcl/tk, then check if /usr/lib contains soft links to actual library files. Here is my /usr/lib listing:

ls -al libtcl* libtk*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     14 2008-02-06 02:28 libtcl8.4.so -> libtcl8.4.so.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 738724 2007-10-04 15:25 libtcl8.4.so.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root     13 2008-02-06 02:29 libtk8.4.so -> libtk8.4.so.0
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 911480 2007-10-12 09:39 libtk8.4.so.0

-The Devel and Extras packages are iso images. You don't need to burn CDs in order to access them. Use mount -o loop (Mike Arthur's page)

3. After install, go to /opt/ibm/systemsim-cell/doc and read up SystemSim Users Guide to get understanding of Mambo commands and high level architecture.
   Also skim through SystemSim programming guide. We won't be needing the SPE part for this assignment.

4. make sure "systemsim" is in your path. (it's under /opt/ibm/systemsim-cell/bin)

5. systemsim is the cell simulator. It needs a .tcl config file to read the machine configuration from. The configuration specified in .tcl file will be the machine simulated by Mambo during its run. By default (when invoked without arguments), systemsim picks up a template .tcl file from its installation directory. We won't be using it for our purpose.

6. As a starting point, a simple MMM code is provided. To run this code on Mambo, run following commands

   $make
   $export PGM=mmm		 ;; PGM variable should be the program which you want to run on Mambo
   $systemsim -f stdalone.tcl	 ;; Invoke systemsim with configuration specified in stdalone.tcl

7.At the end of program run, scroll up the output and find lines similar to following

     48133633: ** finished running 12681701 instructions **

  First number is the # of cycles and second one is the # of instructions executed during full run of the program. Notice that these statistics are for the Entire Run of Program, not only the MMM loop.

  By default, the stdalone.tcl script
  - Runs the PPE program as standalone application
  - Prints out the cpu and cache statistics. Cache statistics can be turned off by commenting out the simulator command from script.

  
There is plenty of help available on Web as well, IBM's Cell BE resource center is a good place to start:

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/cell/index.html?S_TACT=105AGX16