Reverse State Reconstruction for Sampled Microarchitectural Simulation

14 years 5 months ago

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For simulation, a tradeoff exists between speed and accuracy. The more instructions simulated from the workload, the more accurate the results — but at a higher cost. To reduce processor simulation times, a variety of techniques have been introduced. Statistically sampled simulation is one method that mitigates the cost of simulation while retaining high accuracy. A contiguous group of instructions, called a cluster, is simulated and then a fast type of simulation is used to skip to the next group. As instructions are skipped, nonsampling bias is introduced and must be removed for accurate measurements to be taken. In this paper, the Reverse State Reconstruction warm-up method is introduced. While skipping between clusters, the data necessary for reconstruction are recorded. Later, these data are scanned in reverse order so that processor state can be approximated without functionally applying every skipped instruction. By trading storage for speed, the proposed method introduces th...

Paul D. Bryan, Michel C. Rosier, Thomas M. Conte

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