Profiling an Architectural Simulator

In this work we set out to answer the following two questions: (1) where are the bottlenecks in a state-of-the-art architectural simulator? (2) How much can we make architectural simulations run faster by tuning simple system configuration? We choose gem5 as the representative architectural simulator, run several simulations with various configurations, perform a detailed Top-Down analysis of the gem5 source code, and tune system settings for running simulations more efficiently.