An Inductive Method to Select Simulation Points

Abstract

SUMMARYThe time taken for processor simulation can be drastically reduced by selecting simulation points, which are dynamic sections obtained from the simulation result of processors. The overall behavior of the program can be estimated by simulating only these sections. The existing methods to select simulation points, such as SimPoint, used for selecting simulation points are deductive and based on the idea that dynamic sections executing the same static section of the program are of the same phase. However, there are counterexamples for this idea. This paper proposes an inductive method, which selects simulation points from the results obtained by pre-simulating several processors with distinctive microarchitectures, based on assumption that sections in which all the distinctive processors have similar istructions per cycle (IPC) values are of the same phase. We evaluated the first 100G instructions of SPEC 2006 programs. Our method achieved an IPC estimation error of approximately 0.1% by simulating approximately 0.05% of the 100G instructions.