Environment for multiprocessor simulator development

To develop multiprocessor systems for continuing the precipitous increase in performance seen in recent years, it is important to include performance prediction at a preim-plementation stage. Since software simulation, which is one such performance prediction technique, has a high degree of flexibility, it is used in diverse situations. To simulate a multiprocessor system, a simulator is implemented for a specific architecture. However, this method has accompanying implementation costs for building a simulator for each different target architecture. In this paper, the authors propose the multiprocessor simulator library ISIS as a multiprocessor simulator construction support system. ISIS is a collection of multiprocessor system internal function block simulators. Multiprocessor simulators having any kind of architecture can be constructed by combining function block simulators. Compared with conventional techniques, implementation costs can be reduced without directly impairing simulator runtime costs. Several multiprocessor simulators were implemented by using ISIS, and their execution speeds and implementation costs were evaluated. Sufficient runtime speeds were obtained for practical uses at extremely low implementation costs. ISIS has actually been used in research for on-chip multiprocessor cache systems, and various kinds of knowledge have been obtained from the evaluation results of that research.