Simulation of multiprocessors: accuracy and performance
Simulation of multiprocessors: accuracy and performance
The Wisconsin Wind Tunnel: virtual prototyping of parallel computers
SIGMETRICS '93 Proceedings of the 1993 ACM SIGMETRICS conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
The Stanford FLASH multiprocessor
ISCA '94 Proceedings of the 21st annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Surpassing the TLB performance of superpages with less operating system support
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
The performance impact of flexibility in the Stanford FLASH multiprocessor
ASPLOS VI Proceedings of the sixth international conference on Architectural support for programming languages and operating systems
Talisman: fast and accurate multicomputer simulation
Proceedings of the 1995 ACM SIGMETRICS joint international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
The SPLASH-2 programs: characterization and methodological considerations
ISCA '95 Proceedings of the 22nd annual international symposium on Computer architecture
Integrating performance monitoring and communication in parallel computers
Proceedings of the 1996 ACM SIGMETRICS international conference on Measurement and modeling of computer systems
The SimpleScalar tool set, version 2.0
ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News
Measuring memory hierarchy performance of cache-coherent multiprocessors using micro benchmarks
SC '97 Proceedings of the 1997 ACM/IEEE conference on Supercomputing
Complete Computer System Simulation: The SimOS Approach
IEEE Parallel & Distributed Technology: Systems & Technology
The MIPS R10000 Superscalar Microprocessor
IEEE Micro
MINT: A Front End for Efficient Simulation of Shared-Memory Multiprocessors
MASCOTS '94 Proceedings of the Second International Workshop on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation On Computer and Telecommunication Systems
The Impact of Instruction-Level Parallelism on Multiprocessor Performance and Simulation Methodology
HPCA '97 Proceedings of the 3rd IEEE Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture
Visualizing Application Behavior on Superscalar Processors
INFOVIS '99 Proceedings of the 1999 IEEE Symposium on Information Visualization
The performance and scalability of distributed shared-memory cache coherence protocols
The performance and scalability of distributed shared-memory cache coherence protocols
Efficient performance prediction for modern microprocessors
Efficient performance prediction for modern microprocessors
SimICS/sun4m: a virtual workstation
ATEC '98 Proceedings of the annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
lmbench: portable tools for performance analysis
ATEC '96 Proceedings of the 1996 annual conference on USENIX Annual Technical Conference
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Simulation is the primary method for evaluating computer systems during all phases of the design process. One significant problem with simulation is that it rarely models the system exactly, and quantifying the resulting simulator error can be difficult. More importantly, architects often assume without proof that although their simulator may make inaccurate absolute performance predictions, it will still accurately predict architectural trends.This paper studies the source and magnitude of error in a range of architectural simulators by comparing the simulated execution time of several applications and microbenchmarks to their execution time on the actual hardware being modeled. The existence of a hardware gold standard allows us to find, quantify, and fix simulator inaccuracies. We then use the simulators to predict architectural trends and analyze the sensitivity of the results to the simulator configuration. We find that most of our simulators predict trends accurately, as long as they model all of the important performance effects for the application in question. Unfortunately, it is difficult to know what these effects are without having a hardware reference, as they can be quite subtle. This calls into question the value, for architectural studies, of highly detailed simulators whose characteristics are not carefully validated against a real hardware design.