SimOS-Goodson: A Goodson-Processor Based Multi-Core Full-System Simulator

As the Chip MultiProcessors (CMPs) have become the trend of high performance microprocessors, the target workloads become more and more diversified. The traditional user-level simulators cannot handle them, so new simulators are needed for the future architecture research. Based on the SimOS full-system environment, a new multi-core full-system simulator of Goodson processors, SimOS-Goodson, has been designed and implemented. The SimOS-Goodson decouples the simulation functionality and timing. It adopts a new value-prediction approach to implement memory consistency in the simulation environment. The credibility and accuracy of SimOS-Goodson are achieved by cross-validating the simulator with the actual hardware. The simulator inherits the benefits such as high speed and high flexibility from the traditional user-level simulators. It also has the new benefits such as accuracy, full-system support and easy to use. By porting the entire Linux OS, analysis and evaluation of the microarchitecture and workloads can be conducted easily in the SimOS-Goodson full-system environment. On a machine of Pentium4 3.0GHz, the speed of SimOS-Goodson exceeds 300K instructions per second. SimOS-Goodson will play a key role in the research of future Goodson multi-core architecture.