Intrinsic Checkpointing: A Methodology for Decreasing Simulation Time Through Binary Modification

With the proliferation of benchmarks available today, benchmarking new designs can significantly impact overall development time. In order to fully test and represent a typical workload, a large number of benchmarks must be run, and while current techniques such as SimPoint and SMARTS have had considerable success reducing simulation time, there are still areas of improvement. This paper details a methodology that continues to decrease this simulation time by analyzing and augmenting benchmark binaries to contain intrinsic checkpoints that allow for the rapid execution of important portions of code thereby removing the need for explicit checkpointing support. In addition, these modified binaries have increased portability across multiple simulation environments and the ability to be run in a highly parallel fashion. Average speedups for SPEC2000 of roughly 60x are seen over a standard SimPoint interval of 100 million instructions corresponding to a reduction in simulation time from 3.13 hours down to 3 minutes