Abstract

Mint is a software package designed to ease the process of constructing event-driven memory hierarchy simulators for multiprocessors. It provides a set of simulated processors that run standard Unix executable files compiled for a MIPS R3000 based multiprocessor. These generate multiple streams of memory reference events that drive a user-provided memory system simulator. Mint uses a novel hybrid technique that exploits the best aspects of native execution and software interpretation to minimize the overhead of processor simulation. Combined with related techniques to improve performance, this approach makes simulation on uniprocessor hosts extremely efficient. 1 Introduction The simulation of high-performance computer systems is computationally expensive. Each unit of simulated processor execution time requires many units of simulator time. If the target is a parallel computer, simulator time necessarily grows in proportion to the total amount of work done in the simulated parallel ...

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