Architectural simulators are essential tools for computer architecture and systems research and development. Simulators, however, are becoming frustratingly slow, because they must now model increasingly complex micro...
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ISBN:
(纸本)9781581134148
Architectural simulators are essential tools for computer architecture and systems research and development. Simulators, however, are becoming frustratingly slow, because they must now model increasingly complex micro-architectures running realistic workloads. Previously, we developed a technique called fast-forwarding, which applied partial evaluation and memoization to improve the performance of detailed architectural simulations by as much as an order of magnitude [14]. While writing a detailed processor simulator is difficult, implementing fast-forwarding is even more complex. This paper describes Facile, a domain-specific language for writing detailed, accurate micro-architecture simulators. Architectural descriptions written in Facile can be compiled, using partial evaluation techniques, into fast-forwarding simulators that achieve significant performance improvements with far less programmer effort. Facile and its compiler make this performance-enhancing technique accessible to computer architects.
Our new out-of-orderprocessor simulatol; FastSim, uses two innovations to speed up simulation 8--15 times (vs. Wisconsin SimpleScalar) with no loss in simulation accuracy. First, FastSim uses speculative direct-execu...
详细信息
ISBN:
(纸本)9781581131079
Our new out-of-orderprocessor simulatol; FastSim, uses two innovations to speed up simulation 8--15 times (vs. Wisconsin SimpleScalar) with no loss in simulation accuracy. First, FastSim uses speculative direct-execution to accelerate the functional emulation of speculatively executed program code. Second, it uses a variation on memoization---a well-known technique in programming language implementation---to cache microarchitecture states and the resulting simulator actions, and then "fast forwards" the simulation the next time a cached state is reached. Fast-forwarding accelerates simulation by an order of magnitude, while producing exactly the same, cycle-accurate result as conventional simulation.
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