Cycle accurate transaction-driven simulation with multiple processor simulators

Abstract

Performance of multi-processor simulation is determined by how often simulators exchange events with one another and how accurately simulators model their behaviors. Previous techniques have limited their applicability or sacrificed accuracy for performance. In this paper, we notice that inaccuracy comes from events which arrive between event exchange boundaries. We propose cycle accurate transaction-driven simulation which maintains event exchange boundaries at bus transactions but compensates for accuracy. The proposed technique is implemented in CATS framework and our experiment with 64 processors achieves 1.2M processor cycles/s.