TY - GEN
T1 - Microarchitectural exploration with Liberty
AU - Vachharajani, Manish
AU - Vachharajani, Neil
AU - Penry, David A.
AU - Blome, Jason A.
AU - August, David I.
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2002 IEEE.
PY - 2002
Y1 - 2002
N2 - To find the best designs, architects must rapidly simulate many design alternatives and have confidence in the results. Unfortunately, the most prevalent simulator construction methodology, hand-writing monolithic simulators in sequential programming languages, yields simulators that are hard to retarget, limiting the number of designs explored, and hard to understand, instilling little confidence in the model. Simulator construction tools have been developed to address these problems, but analysis reveals that they do not address the root cause, the error-prone mapping between the concurrent, structural hardware domain and the sequential, functional software domain. This paper presents an analysis of these problems and their solution, the Liberty Simulation Environment (LSE). LSE automatically constructs a simulator from a machine description that closely resembles the hardware, ensuring fidelity in the model. Furthermore, through a strict but general component communication contract, LSE enables the creation of highly reusable component libraries, easing the task of rapidly exploring ever more exotic designs.
AB - To find the best designs, architects must rapidly simulate many design alternatives and have confidence in the results. Unfortunately, the most prevalent simulator construction methodology, hand-writing monolithic simulators in sequential programming languages, yields simulators that are hard to retarget, limiting the number of designs explored, and hard to understand, instilling little confidence in the model. Simulator construction tools have been developed to address these problems, but analysis reveals that they do not address the root cause, the error-prone mapping between the concurrent, structural hardware domain and the sequential, functional software domain. This paper presents an analysis of these problems and their solution, the Liberty Simulation Environment (LSE). LSE automatically constructs a simulator from a machine description that closely resembles the hardware, ensuring fidelity in the model. Furthermore, through a strict but general component communication contract, LSE enables the creation of highly reusable component libraries, easing the task of rapidly exploring ever more exotic designs.
KW - Analytical models
KW - Computational modeling
KW - Computer languages
KW - Contracts
KW - Electronic switching systems
KW - Hardware
KW - Libraries
KW - Microarchitecture
KW - Product design
KW - Writing
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84983179859&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84983179859&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1109/MICRO.2002.1176256
DO - 10.1109/MICRO.2002.1176256
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84983179859
T3 - Proceedings of the Annual International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO
SP - 271
EP - 282
BT - Proceedings - 35th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2002
PB - IEEE Computer Society
T2 - 35th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture, MICRO 2002
Y2 - 18 November 2002 through 22 November 2002
ER -