Improving instruction accurate simulation for parallel automotive applications

High level simulation and modeling techniques have matured significantly over the last years and have become more and more important in practice, e.g., in the industrial hardware development and especially the automotive domain. Complex and detailed modeling requires a lot of time during preparation and execution, is quite error prone and thus, reduces the average time-to-market significantly. One popular approach to mitigate this problem is statistical modeling and simulation. In this paper, we focus on another high level simulation approach for determining accurate runtimes of applications using instruction accurate modeling and simulation. We extend the basic instruction accurate simulation technology from OVP using cache models in conjunction with a statistical cost function, which enables high precision runtime predictions with an significant improvement over the pure instruction accurate approach.