An Inductive Method to Select Simulation Points

The time for processor simulation can be drastically reduced by selecting simulation points, which are such dynamic sections from execution program that the overall behavior for the program can be estimated by simulating only for thoses sections. Existing methods to select simulation points such as SimPoint, are deductive, selects simulation points only from the program, based on the idea that executing the same static section of the program is the same phase. However, there are counterexamples for this idea. This paper proposes an inductive method, which does from the results of pre-simulation of several processors with distinctive microarchitectures, based on the idea that a section, all the distinctive processors, showed the similar IPC value is the same phase. We evaluated the first 100G instructions of SPEC 2006 programs. Our method achieves IPC estimation errors of about 0:1% by simulating about 0:05% of the 100G instructions.