Full text
| |
| Author(s): |
Maxiwell Salvador Garcia
Total Authors: 1
|
| Document type: | Master's Dissertation |
| Press: | Campinas, SP. |
| Institution: | Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Instituto de Computação |
| Defense date: | 2011-11-25 |
| Examining board members: |
Sandro Rigo;
Márcio Seiji Oyamada;
Edson Borin
|
| Advisor: | Sandro Rigo; Rodolfo Jardim de Azevedo |
| Abstract | |
The simulator is one of the most important tools to design a new computer architecture. It has many advantages, the most important are exibility and low cost. The _rst simulators were written from scratch, which was an error-prone practice. Nowadays, Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) simplify the generation of these tools. This work focus on the research of new fast simulation techniques using the ArchC ADL. Beginning from the state-of-art in this area, the compiled simulation, is was possible to speed-up the instruction set simulation performance even higher. Two approaches have been used. The _rst is static compiled simulation, which analyzes and decodes the binary, and specializes the simulator for that application, improving the simulation and reaching high performance. The simulations were only 5 times slower, on average, if compared to native execution on an Intel machine, reaching 900 million instructions per second. The second approach is a dynamic compiled simulation, which requires no knowledge about the application, avoiding the overhead of specializing the simulator. With this approach it is possible to simulate sef-modifying code, such as in boot-loaders and operating systems. The application is decoded and compiled at runtime, using the LLVM framework. The simulation performance reaches an average of 140 million instructions per second, not overcoming the static approach. However, if you consider the overhead of generating the static compiled simulator, the dynamic approach becomes better, being an excellent alternative to the designer who has no interest in repeating simulations for the same application (AU) | |
| FAPESP's process: | 09/13230-9 - Dynamic-compiled Simulation for ArchC |
| Grantee: | Maxiwell Salvador Garcia |
| Support Opportunities: | Scholarships in Brazil - Master |