Enhancements and Applications of the SimpleScalar Simulator for Undergraduate and Graduate

Abstract—This paper describes enhancements and appli-cations of the SimpleScalar simulator for undergraduate and graduate courses on computer architecture. The en-hancements include additional instruction profiling statis-tics, visualization of data hazards, visualization of mem-ory access behavior, and multiprocessor capabilities with visualization of cache coherence. The applications in-clude prediction of pipelined execution time with stalls for hazards and cache misses, instilling deeper insight into cache locality, parallel programming, and a greater appreciation of cache coherence interactions for multi-processor programs.