Performance analysis through synthetic trace generation

Most research in the area of microarchitectural performance analysis is done using trace-driven simulations. Although trace-driven simulations are fairly accurate, they are both time- and space-consuming which makes them sometimes impractical. Modeling the execution of a computer program by a statistical profile and generating a synthetic benchmark trace from this statistical profile can be used to accelerate the design process. Thanks to the statistical nature of this technique, performance characteristics quickly converge to a steady state solution during simulation, which makes this technique suitable for fast design space explorations. In this paper, it is shown how more detailed statistical profiles can be obtained and how the synthetic trace generation mechanism should be designed to generate syntactically correct benchmark traces. As a result, the performance predictions in this paper are far more accurate than those reported in previous research.