P-GAS: Parallelizing a Cycle-Accurate Event-Driven Many-Core Processor Simulator Using Parallel Discrete Event Simulation

Abstract

Multi-core processors are commonly available now, but most traditional computer architectural simulators still use single-thread execution. In this paper we use parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) to speedup a cycle-accurate event-driven many-core processor simulator. Evaluation against the sequential version shows that the parallelized one achieves an average speedup of 10.9× (up to 13.6×) running SPLASH-2 kernel on a 16-core host machine, with cycle counter differences of less than 0.1%. Moreover, super-linear speedups are achieved between running 1 thread and 8 threads due to reduced overhead of insert-event-to-queue time and increased cache size in parallel processing. We conclude that PDES could be an attractive option for achieving fast cycle-accurate many-core processor simulations.