Cycle-Accurate 64-Core FPGA-Based Hybrid Simulator

Nowadays, computer architecture researches mainly focus on the multicore hardware and software design. As compared with the traditional uniprocessor counterpart, the system complexity of multicore simulators is dramatically augmented, which is spurred by the increase in core number. Full-system fidelity, fast simulation speed, and cycle-level accuracy are the essential requirements of the advanced multicore simulator adopted as the research vehicle for studying and evaluating multicore systems. Tsinghua Emulation Accelerator of Multicore System or TEAMS is an FPGA accelerated cycle-accurate hybrid simulation platform with full-system fidelity. By leveraging state-of-the-art Xilinx Virtex 5 Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) and the high volume on board SRAM and DRAM, the most concerned issues in multicore microprocessor research, i.e., Cache with data coherency and network on chip (NoC), are emulated and accelerated by hardware in our simulator. Therefore, developers can achieve the precise performance evaluations, which include the hardware cost, the power consumption and the process efficiency, of Cache and NoC in their designs. On the other hand, the functional simulation of each core is executed by the software simulator, which makes the proposed simulator suitable for a wide variety of instruction set processors. By using hardwaresoftware and inter-FPGA synchronizing techniques, the proposed platform realizes the 64-processor cycle-accurate simulation with one FPGA rack. Together, the proposed techniques also enable the outstanding scalability. Without an overwhelming effort, our simulator can perform the 512-core simulation with four FPGA racks.