A reconfigurable simulator for large-scale heterogeneous multicore architectures

Future general purpose architectures will scale to hundreds of cores. In order to accommodate both latency-oriented and throughput-oriented workloads, the system is likely to present a heterogeneous mix of cores. In particular, sequential code can achieve peak performance with an out-of-order core while parallel code achieves peak throughput over a set of simple, in-order (10) or single-instruction, multiple-data (SIMD) cores. These large-scale, heterogeneous architectures form a prohibitively large design space, including not just the mix of cores, but also the memory hierarchy, coherence protocol, and on-chip network (OCN). Because of the abundance of potential architectures, an easily reconfigurable multicore simulator is needed to explore the large design space. We build a reconfigurable multicore simulator based on M5, an event-driven simulator originally targeting a network of processors.