Barra: A Parallel Functional Simulator for GPGPU

Abstract--We present Barra, a simulator of Graphics Processing Units (GPU) tuned for general purpose processing (GPGPU). It is based on the UNISIM framework and it simulates the native instruction set of the Tesla architecture at the functional level. The inputs are CUDA executables produced by NVIDIA tools. No alterations are needed to perform simulations. As it uses parallelism, Barra generates detailed statistics on executions in about the time needed by CUDA to operate in emulation mode. We use it to understand and explore the micro-architecture design spaces of GPUs.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: MASCOTS
• Authors: Sylvain Collange, Marc Daumas, David Defour, David Parello
• Keywords: General Purpose Processing, Graphics Processing Units, MASCOTS 2010, Modeling And Simulation, Present Barra