Analytical-based high-level simulation of the microthreaded many-cores architectures

High-level simulation is becoming commonly used for design space exploration of many-core systems. We have been working on high-level simulation techniques for the microthreaded many-core architecture at the University of Amsterdam. In previous work different levels of high-level simulation for instruction execution have been proposed, where the objective of every level is to keep the highest possible abstraction in order to achieve the least complexity and highest simulation speed with a compromise on the amount of accuracy. In this article we propose a new breakthrough in abstraction by simulating entire components in applications using analytical models. This simulation technique greatly reduces the complexity of the simulator and increases the simulation speed by orders of magnitude compared to the other levels of the high-level simulator, without affecting the simulation accuracy.