An effective synchronization approach for fast and accurate multi-core instruction-set simulation

Abstract

This paper proposes a synchronization approach for fast and accu-rate Multi-Core Instruction-Set Simulation (MCISS). An ideal MCISS should run accurately in a real-time fashion. In order to achieve accurate simulation results of MCISS, a lock-step approach, which synchronizes every cycle, is commonly used. However, this approach introduces immense overhead and lowers the simulation speed. Instead of synchronizing every cycle, our approach synchronizes the MCISS based on the data dependency among the simulated programs. Therefore, the synchronization overheads can be highly reduced while the accurate simulation results are ensured. With the proposed approach applied, the simulation speed of MCISS is up to 40 ∼ 1,000 million instructions per second (MIPS) in general. Copyright 2009 ACM.