1 Reducing Simulation Time by Parallelizing SimpleScalar in MPI Through The Use of SimPoint Generated Intervals

Cycle accurate simulation is an essential tool used in the evaluation and design exploration of modern computer architectures. Due to the increasing complexity, additional critical constraints and ever expanding design space, cycle-level simulation time is growing at an unprecedented rate. A parallel approach to simulation at first appears to be an obvious choice; however previous attempts to parallelize simulators have been largely unsuccessful due to the sequential nature of the problem, often resorting to parallelizing multiple threads or simulating multiple processors. With recent advances in phase analysis, however, the use of "SimPoint " to choose simulation points can break a single thread of execution into multiple representative intervals of simulation, which are entirely independent. In this paper, we use SimPoint simulation points to demonstrate a parallel approach to architecture simulation using MPI (Message Passing Interface) on a cluster of computers. Our preliminary experiment results show that this approach greatly reduces simulation time, while maintaining the high levels of accuracy that SimPoint provides