MGSim — A simulation environment for multi-core research and education

Abstract

This article presents MGSim1, an open source discrete event simulator for on-chip hardware components developed at the University of Amsterdam. MGSim is used as research and teaching vehicle to study the fine-grained hardware/software interactions on many-core chips with and without hardware multithreading. MGSim's component library includes support for core models with different instruction sets, a configurable interconnect, multiple configurable cache and memory models, a dedicated I/O subsystem, and comprehensive monitoring and interaction facilities. The default model configuration shipped with MGSim implements Microgrids, a multi-core architecture with hardware concurrency management. MGSim is furthermore written mostly in C++ and uses object classes to represent chip components. It is optimized for architecture models that can be described as process networks.