A sampling microarchitecture simulator for Java workloads

Abstract—JavaTMhas found widespread adoption across a va-riety of architectures. Understanding Java application behavior and further design and development of Java systems can be facil-itated by software based microarchitecture simulators. However, the use of cycle-accurate, user-mode, software microarchitecture simulators in Java characterization studies are scarce and can be attributed to the following reasons: (1) simulating Java ap-plications require the simulator to implement additional features necessary to support the Java runtime which allows dynamic compilation, thread scheduling and garbage collection, (2) the lack of such a simulator validated against actual hardware and its inability to support contemporary Java applications, (3) the complexity of Java applications and the intricate hardware that needs to be modelled result in impractically long simulation time for a single full run of the application, in turn adversely affectin