PartitionSim: A Parallel Simulator for Many-cores

This paper introduces PartitionSim, a parallel simulator for future thousand-core processors. The purpose of PartitionSim is to improve the simulation performance of many-core architectures at the expense of little accuracy sacrifice. To achieve this goal, we propose a novel technique: timing partition. Timing partition is based on such an observation: in a target system, interacting components communicate with each other and impose simulation synchronization while non-interacting components don't communicate with each other and allow asynchronous simulation. It divides the target timing models into two groups: non-interacting group and interacting group. Non-interacting timing models are simulated by host threads that synchronize little with each other to improve speed and hurt little accuracy, while interacting timing models are simulated by host threads that synchronize strictly with each other to preserve accuracy. Using PartitionSim, We have simulated a target composed of thousands of cores on a 16-core SMP machine. The evaluation results show that timing partition scales well with near linear speedup and has considerable performance at the expense of little accuracy sacrifice.