Multi-objective hardware-software co-optimization for the SNIPER multi-core simulator

Modern complex microarchitectures with multicore systems like CPUs, APUs (accelerated processing units) and GPUs require hundreds or thousands of hardware parameters to be fine-tuned to get the best results regarding different objectives like: performance, hardware complexity (integration area), power consumption, temperature, etc. These are only a few of the objectives needed to be taken into consideration when designing a new multicore system. Exploring this huge design space requires special tools like automatic design space exploration frameworks to optimize the hardware parameters. Although the microarchitecture might be very complex, the performance of the applications is also highly dependent on the degree of software optimization. This adds a new challenge to the DSE process. In this paper, using the multi-objective design space exploration tool FADSE, we tried to optimize the hardware and software parameters of the multicore SNIPER simulator running SPLASH-2 benchmarks suite. We optimized the hardware parameters (nr cores, cache sizes, cache associativity, etc.) and software parameters (GCC optimizations, threads, and scheduler) values that have been varied during the DSE process and shown the impact of these parameters on the optimization´s multi-objectives (performance, area and power consumption). Furthermore, for the best found Pareto configurations the temperatures will be computed so that in the end we will have a 4-dimensional objective space.