Faster Architectural Simulation through Parallelism

Architectural simulation of complex systems is usually constrained by available computational resources. Recently, several commercial parallel processing systems have appeared with price-performance levels that make very intense simulations affordable. In this paper, we briefly review architectural simulation technology, then describe the approach used to develop a parallel architectural simulator. Performance of the parallel simulator is then experimentally characterized and analyzed. This study is one of the earliest to report measured performance of a widely-used commercial simulator, running non-trivial designs on a popular parallel computing system.