SIMinG-1k: A Thousand-Core Simulator Running on General-Purpose Graphical Processing Units

Shivani Raghav, Andrea Marongiu, Christian Pinto, Martino Ruggiero, David Atienza, and Luca Benini.
Concurrency and Computation: Practice and Experience, October 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/cpe.2940.
This paper introduces SIMinG-1k – a manycore simulator infrastructure. SIMinG-1k is a graphics processing unit accelerated, parallel simulator for design-space exploration of large-scale manycore systems. It features an optimal trade-off between modeling accuracy and simulation speed. Its main objectives are high performance, flexibility, and ability to simulate thousands of cores. SIMinG-1k can model different architectures (currently, we support ARM and Intel x86) using two-step approach where architecture specificc front end is decoupled from a fast and parallel manycore virtual machine running on graphical processing unit platform. We evaluate the simulator for target architecture with up to 4096 cores. Our results demonstrate very high scalability and almost linear speedup with simulation of increasing number of cores.