CATS: cycle accurate transaction-driven simulation with multiple processor simulators

Abstract

This paper focuses on enhancing performance of cycle accurate simulation with multiple processor simulators. Simulation performance is determined by how often simulators exchange events with one another and how accurately simulators model their behavior. Previous techniques have limited their applicability or sacrificed accuracy for performance. In this paper, we notice that inaccuracy comes from events which arrive between event exchange boundaries. To solve the problem, we propose cycle accurate transaction-driven simulation which maintains event exchange boundaries at bus transactions but compensates for accuracy. The proposed technique is implemented in a publicly available CATS framework and our experiment with 64 processors achieves 1.2M processor cycles/s (200K instructions/s) which is faster than other cycle accurate frameworks by an order of magnitude.