HSAemu - A full system emulator for HSA platforms

Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is an open industry standard designed to support a large variety of data-parallel and task-parallel programming models. Currently, most of HSA hardware and software components are still in development. It is helpful to provide various heterogeneous simulation environments for HSA developers in developing HSA software stacks. This paper presents the design of HSAemu, a full system emulator for the HSA platform, and illustrates how those HSA features are implemented in the simulator. HSAemu provides an infrastructure of heterogeneous simulation environments by supporting required HSA features, including hUMA, hQ and HSAIL. Based on the infrastructure, HSAemu provide two simulation models, FastSim and DeepSim, for high-speed functional emulation and slow cycle-accurate simulation, respectively. In our preliminary experiments, HSAemu helps test a complete HSA software stack and profile system performance. Our case studies show that HSAemu is very useful as a hardware/software co-design tool for heterogeneous systems.