AbstractsComputer Science

Recently the community started looking into Hardware/Software (HW/SW) co-designed processors as potential solutions to move towards the less power consuming and the less complex designs. Unlike other solutions, they reduce the power and the complexity doing so called dynamic binary translation and optimization from a guest ISA to an internal host custom ISA. This thesis tries to answer the question on how to simulate this kind of architectures. For any kind of processor's architecture, the simulation is the common practice, because it is impossible to build several versions of hardware in order to try all alternatives. The simulation of HW/SW co-designed processors has a big issue in comparison with the simulation of traditional HW-only architectures. First of all, open source tools do not exist. Therefore researches many times assume that the software layer overhead, which is in charge for dynamic binary translation and optimization, is constant or ignored. In this thesis we show that such an assumption is not valid and that can lead to very inaccurate results. Therefore including the software layer in the simulation is a must. On the other side, the simulation is very slow in comparison to native execution, so the community spent a big effort on delivering accurate results in a reasonable amount of time. Therefore it is the common practice for HW-only processors that only parts of application stream, which are called samples, are simulated. Samples usually correspond to different phases in the application stream and usually they are no longer than a few million of instructions. In order to archive accurate starting state of each sample, microarchitectural structures are warmed-up for a few million instructions prior to samples instructions. Unfortunately, such a methodology cannot be directly applied for HW/SW co-designed processors. The warm-up for HW/SW co-designed processors needs to be 3-4 orders of magnitude longer than the warm-up needed for traditional HW-only processor, because the warm-up of software layer needs to be longer than the warm-up of hardware structures. To overcome such a problem, in this thesis we propose a novel warm-up technique specialized for HW/SW co-designed processors. Our solution reduces the simulation time by at least 65X with an average error of just 0.75%. Such a trend is visible for different software and hardware configurations. The process used to determine simulation samples cannot be applied to HW/SW co-designed processors as well, because due to the software layer, samples show more dissimilarities than in the case of HW-only processors. Therefore we propose a novel algorithm that needs 3X less number of samples to achieve similar error like the state of the art algorithms. Again, such a trend is visible for different software and hardware configurations.; Els processadors co-dissenyats Hardware/Software (HW/SW co-designed processors) han estat proposats per l'acadèmia i la indústria com a solucions potencials per a fabricar processadors menys complexos i que consumeixen…