Barra, a Modular Functional GPU Simulator for GPGPU

The use of GPUs for general-purpose applications promises huge performance returns for a small investment. However the internal design of such processors is undocumented and many details are unknown, preventing developers to optimize their code for these architectures. One solution is to use functional simulation to determine program behavior and gather statistics when counters are missing or unavailable. Functional simulators are made of several parts. In this article we present a GPU functional simulator targeting GPGPU based on the UNISIM framework which takes a Nvidia cubin file as input.

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