Coarse-grained simulation method for performance evaluation a of shared memory system

We propose a coarse-grained simulation method which takes the effect of memory access contention into account. The method can be used for the evaluation of the execution time of an application program during the system architecture design in an early phase of development. In this phase, information about memory access timings is usually not available. Our method uses a statistical approximation of the memory access timings to estimate their influences on the execution time. We report a preliminary verification of our simulation method by comparing it with an experimental result from an image processing application on a dual-core PC. We find an error of the order of 3 percents on the execution time.