CantorSim: Simplifying Acceleration of Micro-architecture Simulations

Many techniques have been developed to accelerate micro-architecture simulation since it is becoming increasingly urgent as the complexity of workloads and simulated processors increases. However, most of popular techniques need profiles or trial simulations to determine parameters before real simulations. When the number of dynamic instructions of workloads such as SPEC CPU2006 is huge, the profiles or trial simulations often take a long time. What´s worse, any changes of benchmarks need to repeat the above work. This paper proposes a novel approach based on fractals to solve this problem. It employs the generation procedure of trisection Cantor Set, a classic fractal, to select instructions simulated in detail. We implement a simulator named CantorSim using the trisection Cantor fractal approach. The simulator is evaluated with benchmark programs from SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006. We show that our approach is micro-architecture independent as the same parameter value for a single program yields similar results on processors with different configurations. The unified analytical model used to determine sampling parameters for different benchmarks indicates the proposed approach can save a lot of time for preparing parameters. On the other hand, for SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006, CantorSim is slightly faster than SMARTSim. The validated average CPI relative errors of the SPEC CPU2000 and SPEC CPU2006 are 3.2% and 2.2% respectively. Therefore, our proposed approach can simplify acceleration of simulations significantly without sacrificing speed and accuracy.