DAPs: Dynamic Adjustment and Partial Sampling for Multithreaded/Multicore Simulation

Abstract

Faced with increasingly large multicore chip designs, architects need fast and accurate simulations for their exploration of design spaces within a limited simulation time budget. In multithreaded applications, threads cannot run simultaneously. Sampling is commonly used to reduce simulation time, but conventional sampling barely detects the instantaneous program variations of synchronization events and the inconsistency between phases of each core. This work proposes a dynamic adjustment and partial sampling technique (DAPs), consisting of aggressive sampling, lazy sampling, and regular sampling, to overcome thread interference in multithreaded applications. Moreover, DAPs partially selects sampling cores to reduce the overhead of sampling inconsistent phases.