JADE: a Heterogeneous Multiprocessor System Simulation Platform Using Recorded and Statistical Application Models

Abstract

Recent advances in the computing industry towards multiprocessor technologies shifted the dominant method of performance increase from frequency scaling to parallelism. Due to its huge design space, evaluating candidate multicore architectures in early design stages, when the number of variables is at its maximum, is challenging. Simulation plays an important role in estimating architecture performance, and evaluating how the system would perform on average, as well as boundary cases, would require many iterations to cover various cases in the application input domain. Since simulation of heterogeneous systems with enough details are naturally slow, exhaustively evaluating the system for all possible inputs require tremendous amount of time and resources. While there exist quite a few multiprocessor simulators available, they often rely on individual input specification, demanding extensive input enumeration and simulation runs, diminishing their effectiveness for complex systems evaluation. Aiming to fulfill this gap, we publicly release a heterogeneous multiprocessor system simulation platform called JADE, targeting fast initial architecture explorations. Opposing to most simulators, JADE uses statistical models that follow distributions extracted from internal structures of the application, providing a more convenient and systematic exploration approach to evaluate systems performance. JADE simulation features include detailed electrical and optical interconnections, detailed memory hierarchy infrastructure, and built-in energy analysis allowing studies of a broad spectrum of systems.