Parallelizing Computer System Simulators

This paper describes NSF-supported work in parallelized computer system simulators being done in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Texas at Austin. Our work is currently following two paths: (i) the FAST simulation methodology[9, 11, 10] that is capable of simulating complex systems accurately and quickly (currently about 1.2MIPS executing the x86 ISA, modeling an out-of-order superscalar processor and booting Windows XP and Linux) and (ii) the RAMP-White (White)[1, 22] platform that will soon be capable of simulating very large systems of around 1000 cores. We plan to combine the projects to provide fast and accurate simulation of multicore systems.