Paper Info
Title
A complexity-effective architecture for accelerating full-system multiprocessor simulations using FPGAs
Abstract
Functional full-system simulators are powerful and versatile research tools for accelerating architectural exploration and advanced software development. Their main shortcoming is limited throughput when simulating systems with hundreds of processors or more. To overcome this bottleneck, we propose the PROTOFLEX simulation architecture, which uses FPGAs to accelerate simulation. Prior FPGA approaches that prototype a complete system in hardware are either too complex when scaling to large-scale configurations or require significant effort to provide full-system support. In contrast, PROTOFLEX reduces complexity by virtualizing the execution of many logical processors onto a consolidated set of multiple-context execution engines on the FPGA. Through virtualization, the number of engines can be judiciously scaled, as needed, to deliver on necessary simulation performance. To achieve low-complexity full-system support, a hybrid simulation technique called transplanting allows implementing in the FPGA only the frequently encountered behaviors, while a software simulator preserves the abstraction of a complete system We have created a first instance of the PROTOFLEX simulation architecture, which is an FPGA-based, full-system functional simulator for a 16-way UltraSPARC III symmetric multiprocessor server hosted on a single Xilinx Virtex-II XCV2P70 FPGA. On average, the simulator achieves a 39x speedup (and as high as 49x) over comparable software simulation across a suite of applications, including OLTP on a commercial database server.
Year
DOI
Venue
2008
10.1145/1344671.1344684
FPGA
Keywords
Field
DocType
low-complexity full-system support,full-system functional simulator,fpga approach,necessary simulation performance,hybrid simulation technique,complexity-effective architecture,full-system multiprocessor simulation,full-system support,complete system,comparable software simulation,functional full-system simulator,protoflex simulation architecture,multicore,prototype,multiprocessor,simulator,fpga,software development
Computer architecture simulator,Computer science,Real-time computing,Multi-core processor,Software development,UltraSPARC,Speedup,Computer architecture,Parallel computing,Online transaction processing,FPGA prototype,Multiprocessing,Embedded system
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
28
1.30
16
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Eric S. Chung164738.01
Eriko Nurvitadhi239933.08
James C. Hoe32048141.34
Babak Falsafi44147242.18
Ken Mai51406104.75