S-SIM: A Simulator for Systolic Array-based DNN Accelerators with Tile Access Awareness

As NN accelerators emerging, many analytical models are presented to help designers to carry out hardware design space exploration. However, these models cannot accurately simulate the systolic array-based NN accelerator due to their pervasiveness or abstraction. In this paper, we propose a compute-centric simulator driven by the execution of events from the tiles of the mapping matrix, which can accurately model the systolic array-based accelerator. The simulator focuses on the conflicts when the tile is used for data access, or various interruptions caused by hardware resource limitations. Experimental results show that the proposed simulator achieves more than 95% accuracy compared to the real scenes.