MALsim: A functional-level parallel simulation platform for CMPs

Xiufeng Sui*, Junmin Wu, Wei Yin, Dapeng Zhou, Zhe Gong

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

5 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Computer system simulation, including both functional level and cycle accurate level, is a crucial method for computer architecture design. And functional simulation is also called simulator kernel. It is built as an autonomous library and provides an interface to the rest of the simulator [1, 2, 3]. And it's really important for system verification and system software development. However, as the approaching of the multi-core era, the fast simulation of chip multiprocessors (CMPs) is becoming a critical challenge to the architecture research community, since the speed of functional simulator suffers from superlinear slowdown as the number of cores increases. Parallel simulation is an efficient way to accelerate architecture simulation of CMPs. In this paper, we implement a parallel functional simulator called MALsim. Our work can be divided into two parts: 1) the parallelization based on multiprogrammed workloads, and 2) the parallelization based on multithreaded workloads. We implement the parallel functional simulator using POSIX threads on a multi-core host system. The evaluations show that our MALsim kernel can reach the average speedup of 1.748, 3.644, 7.372, 15.628 with 2, 4, 8, 16 threads respectively when running multiprogrammed workloads, and it will achieve the average speedup of 1.692, 2.76, 3.833, 5.292 with 2, 4, 8, 16 threads respectively when running multithreaded workloads.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationICCET 2010 - 2010 International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology, Proceedings
PagesV2440-V2444
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event2010 2nd International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology, ICCET 2010 - Chengdu, China
Duration: 16 Apr 201018 Apr 2010

Publication series

NameICCET 2010 - 2010 International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology, Proceedings
Volume2

Conference

Conference2010 2nd International Conference on Computer Engineering and Technology, ICCET 2010
Country/TerritoryChina
CityChengdu
Period16/04/1018/04/10

Keywords

  • Architectural simulation
  • Chip multiprocessors
  • Parallel simulation

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