A Loosely-Coupled Full-System Multicore Simulation Framework

Full-system simulation is critical in evaluating design alternatives for multicore processors. However, state-of-the-art multicore simulators either lack good extensibility due to their tightly-coupled design between functional model (FM) and timing model (TM), or cannot guarantee cycle-accuracy. This paper conducts a comprehensive study on factors affecting cycle-accuracy and uncovers several contributing factors less studied before. Based on these insights, we propose a loosely-coupled functional-driven full-system simulator for multicore, namely Transformer. To ensure extensibility and cycle-accuracy, Transformer leverages an architecture-independent interface between FM and TM and uses a lightweight scheme to detect and recover from execution divergence between FM and TM. Built upon Transformer and its foundational simulator components, a graduate student only needed to write about 180 lines of code to extend an X86 functional model (QEMU) in Transformer. Moreover, the loosely-coupled design also removes the complex interaction between FM and TM and opens the opportunity to parallelize FM and TM to improve performance. Experimental results show that Transformer achieves an average of 8.4 and 7.0 percent performance improvement over GEMS in 4-core and 8-core configuration while guaranteeing cycle-accuracy. A further parallelization between FM and TM leads to 35.3 and 29.7 percent performance improvement respectively.