Open William-An opened 7 months ago
I like the idea. I have not used protobufs before. Are they stored in binary format on disk? If so, are there utilities to parse and print the trace so we can still do manual text inspection on demand? It is quite convenient sometimes to just look at the traces and see what they are doing.
Current Accel-Sim trace file is text-based, unnecessarily consuming a large amount of storage space. Although the trace size can be cut to 1/10 with accel-sim#265 compression trick, another problem with text-based trace format is the complexity of consuming the trace. A parser has to be built to convert the text traces into binary data structures for Accel-Sim or other analysis tools. Considering the fact that most of the time traces are used to drive the simulator rather than examined by humans, it is more convenient to have it in binary form and build a decoder to convert it into text form when needed.
Therefore, I propose using the Goolge ProtoBuf as a substitute for the text trace format. It has the following benefits over current format: