With continued technology scaling and increased power and thermal densities, processor operation and performance are increasingly dominated by physical phenomena. Microarchitectural approaches to mitigate these effects must be based on a profound understanding of how the physics is manifested in microarchitectural executions and system-level properties such as performance, energy efficiency, or lifetime reliability. This requires a modeling and simulation environment that incorporates multiple physical phenomena and their concurrent interactions with microarchitecture. In this paper, we introduce an integrated power, thermal, and reliability modeling framework, KitFox. The goal of KitFox framework is to facilitate research explorations at the intersection of applications, microarchitectures, and various physical phenomena including energy, power, thermal, cooling, and reliability. The KitFox framework implements a standard interface to bridge multiple physical models, where individual models are encapsulated into libraries and are interchangeable. This paper describes the design methodology of the library framework that orchestrates various implementations of physical models and standardized interface to cycle-level microarchitecture simulators. Several use cases are presented to demonstrate the range of modeling capabilities of KitFox.

paper [PDF]