A shared-variable-based synchronization approach to efficient cache coherence simulation for multi-core systems

This paper proposes a shared-variable-based approach for fast and accurate multi-core cache coherence simulation. While the intuitive, conventional approach - synchronizing at either every cycle or memory access - gives accurate simulation results, it has poor performance due to huge simulation overloads. We observe that timing synchronization is only needed before shared variable accesses in order to maintain accuracy while improving the efficiency in the proposed shared-variable-based approach. The experimental results show that our approach performs 6 to 8 times faster than the memory-access-based approach and 18 to 44 times faster than the cycle-based approach while maintaining accuracy.