Selecting a Single, Representative Sample for Accurate Simulation of SPECint Benchmarks

Detailed micro-architecture studies often require time-consuming, cycle-accurate simulation. Unfortunately, many benchmarks of interest, like the SPEC benchmarks, run for tens of billions of instructions and are prohibitive to simulate to completion. Instead, researchers typically must confine themselves to simulating samples of the program’s overall execution. This report presents detailed interval-trace data about the SPECint programs’ branch-prediction and cache behavior. The report then argues that accurate simulation results can be obtained using a single, short simulation window of just 50 million instructions. They key to obtaining accurate results is to choose this simulation window carefully, and in particular to avoid unrepresentative behavior at the beginning of programs’ execution