A Sampling Method Focusing on Practicality

In the past few years, several research works have demonstrated that sampling can drastically speed up architecture simulation, and several of these sampling techniques are already largely used. However, for a sampling technique to be both easily and properly used, i.e., plugged and reliably used into many simulators with little or no effort or knowledge from the user, it must fulfill a number of conditions: it should require no hardware-dependent modification of the functional or timing simulator, it should simultaneously consider warm-up and sampling, while still delivering high speed and accuracy. The motivation for this article is that, with the advent of generic and modular simulation frameworks like ASIM, SystemC, LSE, MicroLib or UniSim, there is a need for sampling techniques with the aforementioned properties, i.e., which are almost entirely transparent to the user and simulator agnostic. In this article, we propose a sampling technique focused more on transparency than on spe...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2006
• Where: MICRO
• Authors: Daniel Gracia Pérez, Hugues Berry, Olivier Temam
• Keywords: Hardware, MICRO 2006, Sampling Technique, Simulator, Warm-up