Combining Light Static Code Annotation and Instruction-Set Emulation for Flexible and Efficient On-the-Fly Simulation (Research Note)

  • Authors:
  • Thierry Lafage;André Seznec

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-

  • Venue:
  • Euro-Par '00 Proceedings from the 6th International Euro-Par Conference on Parallel Processing
  • Year:
  • 2000

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Abstract

This paper proposes a new cost effective approach for on-the-fly microarchitecture simulations on real size applications. The original program code is lightly annotated to provide a fast (direct) execution mode, and an embedded instruction-set emulator enables on-the-fly simulations. While running, the instrumented-and-emulated program can switch from the fast mode to the emulation mode, and vice-versa. The instrumentation tool, calvin2, and the instruction-set emulator, DICE, presented in this paper, exhibit low execution overheads in fast mode (1.31 on average for the SPEC95 benchmarks). This makes our approach well suited to simulate on-the-fly samples spread over an application.