skip to main content
10.1145/1629335.1629362acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesesweekConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

An effective synchronization approach for fast and accurate multi-core instruction-set simulation

Authors Info & Claims
Published:12 October 2009Publication History

ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a synchronization approach for fast and accu-rate Multi-Core Instruction-Set Simulation (MCISS). An ideal MCISS should run accurately in a real-time fashion. In order to achieve accurate simulation results of MCISS, a lock-step approach, which synchronizes every cycle, is commonly used. However, this approach introduces immense overhead and lowers the simulation speed. Instead of synchronizing every cycle, our approach synchronizes the MCISS based on the data dependency among the simulated programs. Therefore, the synchronization overheads can be highly reduced while the accurate simulation results are ensured. With the proposed approach applied, the simulation speed of MCISS is up to 40 ~ 1,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) in general.

References

  1. Simplescalar, available at www.simplescalar.comGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  2. J. Zhu and D. D. Gajski, "A retargetable, ultra-fast instruction set simulator," in DATE '99: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe. pp. 62--69, 1999. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  3. B. Cmelik and D. Keppel, "Shade: a fast instruction-set simulator for execution profiling," in SIGMETRICS '94: Proceedings of the 1994 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems. pp. 128--137, 1994. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  4. E. Witchel and M. Rosenblum, "Embra: fast and flexible machine simulation," in SIGMETRICS '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems. pp. 68--79, 1996. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  5. A. Nohl, G. Braun, O. Schliebusch, R. Leupers, H. Meyr, and A. Hoffmann, "A universal technique for fast and flexible instruction-set architecture simulation," in DAC '02: Proceedings of the 39th conference on Design automation. pp. 22--27, 2002. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  6. M. Reshadi, P. Mishra, and N. Dutt, "Instruction set compiled simulation: a technique for fast and flexible instruction set simulation," in DAC '03: Proceedings of the 40th conference on Design automation. pp. 758--763, 2003. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  7. F. Bellard, "QEMU, a fast and portable dynamic translator," in Proc. of the USENIX Annual Technical Conference, pp. 41--46, 2005. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  8. W. Qin, J. D'Errico, and X. Zhu, "A multiprocessing approach to accelerate retargetable and portable dynamic-compiled instruction-set simulation," in CODES+ISSS '06: Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Hardware/software codesign and system synthesis. pp. 193--198, 2006. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  9. R. L. Sites, A. Chernoff, M. B. Kirk, M. P. Marks, and S. G. Robinson, "Binary translation," Commun. ACM, vol. 36, no. 2, pp. 69--81, 1993. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  10. J. Schnerr, O. Bringmann, and W. Rosenstiel, "Cycle accurate binary translation for simulation acceleration in rapid prototyping of socs," in DATE '05: Proceedings of the conference on Design, Automation and Test in Europe. pp. 792--797, 2005. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  11. S. Mukherjee et al., "Wisconsin Wind Tunnel II: a fast, portable parallel architecture simulator," in Concurrency, IEEE, vol. 8, pp. 12--20, 2000. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  12. J. Jung, S. Yoo, and K. Choi, "Performance improvement of multi-processor systems cosimulation based on sw analysis," in DATE '01: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe. pp. 749--753, 2001. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  13. D. Kim, Y. Yi, and S. Ha, "Trace-driven hw/sw cosimulation using virtual synchronization technique," in DAC '05: Proceedings of the 42nd annual conference on Design automation. pp. 345--348, 2005. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  14. J. Hennessy and D. Patterson, Computer Architecture: a quantitative approach, 4th ed., 2007. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  15. Y. Hwang, S. Abdi, and D. Gajski, "Cycle-approximate re-targetable performance estimation at the transaction level," in DATE '08: Proceedings of the conference on Design, automation and test in Europe. pp. 3--8, 2008. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library
  16. Andes, available at www.andestech.comGoogle ScholarGoogle Scholar
  17. S. C. Woo, M. Ohara, E. Torrie, J. P. Singh, and A. Gupta, "The splash-2 programs: characterization and methodological considerations," in ISCA '95: Proceedings of the 22nd annual international symposium on Computer architecture. pp. 24--36, 1995. Google ScholarGoogle ScholarDigital LibraryDigital Library

Index Terms

  1. An effective synchronization approach for fast and accurate multi-core instruction-set simulation

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Login options

    Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

    Sign in
    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      EMSOFT '09: Proceedings of the seventh ACM international conference on Embedded software
      October 2009
      332 pages
      ISBN:9781605586274
      DOI:10.1145/1629335

      Copyright © 2009 ACM

      Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 12 October 2009

      Permissions

      Request permissions about this article.

      Request Permissions

      Check for updates

      Qualifiers

      • research-article

      Acceptance Rates

      EMSOFT '09 Paper Acceptance Rate33of106submissions,31%Overall Acceptance Rate60of203submissions,30%

      Upcoming Conference

      ESWEEK '24
      Twentieth Embedded Systems Week
      September 29 - October 4, 2024
      Raleigh , NC , USA

    PDF Format

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader