Abstract

Microarchitectural simulation is needed to help explore the large design space of new computer systems. These simulations are taking increasingly longer amounts of time to run due to the increasing complexity of modern processors. Co-simulation and high level synthesis are promising fields to improve the overall time required for microarchitectural simulators, and can contribute to low design times and fast simulation speeds permitting a larger range of design space exploration. While promising, co-simulation techniques must find effective ways to map the host memory address space to the FPGA memory address space to be able to correctly transfer simulation data between the host and FPGA. Load relations mapping is a new technique that builds upon existing techniques to provide support for the discovery and translation of runtime memory addresses to their equivalent FPGA memory addresses. This is accomplished by storing object reachability information discovered during a memory profiling run and later using it to recreate an object reachability mapping at runtime. This mapping can be traversed to discover needed memory addresses. We demonstrate how this technique can be used by incorporating it into the FAMEbuilder tool flow. Results show that simulation speed is not reduced and that only a small overhead is required to perform the additional memory initialization at the start of simulation. Area increases are also shown and are limited to near 10\% increase on small single core models.

Degree

College and Department

Ira A. Fulton College of Engineering and Technology; Electrical and Computer Engineering

Rights

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