ParTejas: A parallel simulator for multicore processors

In this paper, we present the design of a novel multicore simulator called ParTejas. It is a fast shared memory based parallel simulator written in Java. Unlike recently released parallel simulators that mainly rely on sampling, high level models, and highly relaxed synchronization, we primarily rely on novel concurrent data structures. In specific, we use a lock free parallel slot scheduler for synchronizing the accesses of multiple threads at a shared resource, and we use flexible barriers known as phasers to relax synchronization within bounds. We leverage additional language specific features of Java, and demonstrate a mean speedup of 11.8X (simulation speed of 4-8 MIPS) with 64 threads for a suite of Splash2 and Parsec benchmarks.