Full-system timing-first simulation

Computer system designers often evaluate future design alternatives with detailed simulators that strive for functional fidelity (to execute relevant workloads) and performance fidelity (to rank design alternatives). Trends toward multithreaded architectures, more complex micro-architectures, and richer workloads, make authoring detailed simulators increasingly difficult. To manage simulator complexity, this paper advocates decoupled simulator organizations that separate functional and performance concerns. Furthermore, we define an approach, called timing-first simulation, that uses an augmented timing simulator to execute instructions important to performance in conjunction with a functional simulator to insure correctness. This design simplifies software development, leverages existing simulators, and can model microarchitecture timing in detail. We describe the timing-first organization and our experiences implementing TFsim, a full-system multiprocessor performance simulator. TFs...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2002
• Where: SIGMETRICS
• Authors: Carl J. Mauer, Mark D. Hill, David A. Wood
• Keywords: Hardware, Performance, SIGMETRICS 2002, Simulator, Timing Simulator