A trace-driven approach for fast and accurate simulation of manycore architectures

Abstract

The evolution of manycore systems, forecasted to feature hundreds of cores by the end of the decade calls for efficient solutions for design space exploration and debugging. Among the relevant existing solutions the well-known gem5 simulator provides a rich architecture description framework. However, these features come at the price of prohibitive simulation time that limits the scope of possible explorations to configurations made of tens of cores. To address this limitation, this paper proposes a novel trace-driven simulation approach for efficient exploration of manycore architectures.