Parallel simulation of multiprocessor execution: implementation and results for simplescalar

In research that relies on simulation in order to predict and compare the performance of proposed computing architectures, multiprocessor simulations have inherent concurrency that can be exploited for parallelization in order to reduce the execution time for a simulation. This paper describes the initial experiences in first introducing multiprocessor simulation support for the detailed out-of-order target simulatorfiom the popular Simplescalar tool set, and then parallelizing the resulting simulator for execution on a multiprocessor host system. The extended simulator provides the basis for further detailed modeling of target systems with multiple out-of-order processors through parallel simulation on a multiprocessor host. For experiments conducted on a Sun Enterprise 3500 platform, the measured speedup for the initial version of the parallelized simulator reached 4.4 on 6processors for a selected application from the SPLASH-2 benchmark.