A Universal Parallel Front-End for Execution-Driven Microarchitecture Simulation

C. Kersey, A. Rodrigues, and S. Yalamanchili. “A Universal Parallel Front-End for Execution-Driven Microarchitecture Simulation.” HIPEAC Workshop on Rapid Simulation and Performance Evaluation: Methods and Tools. January 2012.

Abstract

Execution driven microarchitecture simulators tend to devote a large portion of their source code to a front-end that performs instruction set level functional simulation, providing the decoded instruction stream to a back-end that performs timing simulation. In this paper we introduce the current incarnation of QSim, a universal front-end for execution driven multicore microarchitecture simulators. QSim ad\-apts the popular and portable QEMU full-system emulator to a thread safe, instruction set neutral API, running unmodified application binaries in a lightly modified Linux operating system. QSim has been shown to support at least 512 emulated hardware threads, each running in a separate host thread.

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Citation

@inproceedings{kersey2012universal,
  title={A universal parallel front-end for execution driven microarchitecture simulation},
  author={Kersey, Chad D and Rodrigues, Arun and Yalamanchili, Sudhakar},
  booktitle={Proceedings of the 2012 Workshop on Rapid Simulation and Performance Evaluation: Methods and Tools},
  pages={25--32},
  year={2012},
  organization={ACM}
}