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Simulation technique

RSIM interprets application executables. We chose to drive RSIM with application executables rather than traces so that interaction between events of different processors during the simulation can affect the course of the simulated execution. This allows more accurate modeling of the effects of contention and synchronization in simulations of multiprocessors, and more accurate modeling of speculation in simulations of multiprocessors and uniprocessors. We chose to interpret application executables rather than use direct execution because modeling ILP processors accurately with direct execution is currently an open problem.

RSIM is a discrete event-driven simulator based on the YACSIM library [3, 8]. Many of the subsystems within RSIM are activated as events only when they have work to perform. However, the processors and caches are simulated using a single event that is scheduled for execution on every cycle, as these units are likely to have activity on nearly every cycle. On every cycle, this event appropriately changes the state of each processor's pipelines and processes outstanding cache requests.



Vijay Sadananda Pai
Thu Aug 7 14:18:56 CDT 1997