Barra, a Parallel Functional GPGPU Simulator

Abstract. We present a GPU functional simulator targeting GPGPU based on the UNISIM framework which takes unaltered NVIDIA CUDA executables as input. It simulates the native instruction set of the Tesla architecture at the functional level and generates detailed execution statistics. Simulation speed is competitive with the less-accurate CUDA emulation mode thanks to optimizations which exploit the inherent par-allelism of GPGPU applications. Furthermore, it opens the way for GPU microarchitecture design space exploration.