EXPERT: expedited simulation exploiting program behavior repetition

Studying program behavior is a central component in architectural designs. In this paper, we study and exploit one aspect of program behavior, the behavior repetition, to expedite simulation. Detailed architectural simulation can be long and computationally expensive. Various alternatives are commonly used to simulate a much smaller instruction stream to evaluate design choices: using a reduced input set or simulating only a small window of the instruction stream. In this paper, we propose to reduce the amount of detailed simulation by avoiding simulating repeated code sections that demonstrate stable behavior. By characterizing program behavior repetition and use the information to select a subset of instructions for detailed simulation, we can significantly speed up the process without affecting the accuracy. In most cases, simulation time of full-length SPEC CPU2000 benchmarks is reduced from hundreds of hours to a few hours. The average error incurred is only about 1% or less for...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: ICS
• Authors: Wei Liu, Michael C. Huang
• Keywords: Behavior Repetition, ICS 2004, Program Behavior, Simulation, Theoretical Computer Science