Fine grain analysis of simulators accuracy for calibrating performance models

In embedded system design, the tuning and validation of a cycle accurate simulator is a difficult task. The designer has to assure that the estimation error of the simulator meets the design constraints on every application. If an application is not correctly estimated, the designer has to identify on which parts of the application the simulator introduces an estimation error and consequently fix the simulator. However, detecting which are the mispredicted parts of a very large application can be a difficult process which requires a lot of time. In this paper we propose a methodology which helps the designer to fast and automatically isolate the portions of the application mispredicted by a simulator. This is accomplished by recursively analyzing the application source code trace highlighting the mispredicted sections of source code. The results obtained applying the methodology to the TSIM simulator show how our methodology is able to fast analyze large applications isolating small portions of mispredicted code.