Title :
gem5-gpu: A Heterogeneous CPU-GPU Simulator
Author :
Power, Jason ; Hestness, Joel ; Orr, Marc S. ; Hill, Mark D. ; Wood, David A.
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI, USA
Abstract :
gem5-gpu is a new simulator that models tightly integrated CPU-GPU systems. It builds on gem5, a modular full-system CPU simulator, and GPGPUSim, a detailed GPGPU simulator. gem5-gpu routes most memory accesses through Ruby, which is a highly configurable memory system in gem5. By doing this, it is able to simulate many system configurations, ranging from a system with coherent caches and a single virtual address space across the CPU and GPU to a system that maintains separate GPU and CPU physical address spaces. gem5gpu can run most unmodified CUDA 3.2 source code. Applications can launch non-blocking kernels, allowing the CPU and GPU to execute simultaneously. We present gem5-gpu´s software architecture and a brief performance validation. We also discuss possible extensions to the simulator. gem5-gpu is open source and available at gem5-gpu.cs.wisc.edu.
Keywords :
computer architecture; graphics processing units; GPGPUSim; gem5-gpu simulator; heterogeneous CPU-GPU simulator; modular full-system CPU simulator; nonblocking kernels; software architecture; Coherence; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Graphics processing units; Kernel; Object oriented modeling; Protocols; Modeling techniques; general-purpose graphics processors; heterogeneous (hybrid) systems; simulators;
Journal_Title :
Computer Architecture Letters
DOI :
10.1109/LCA.2014.2299539