Microarchitectural Exploration with Liberty [abstract] (IEEE Xplore, PDF)
Manish Vachharajani, Neil Vachharajani, David A. Penry, Jason A. Blome, and David I. August
Proceedings of the 35th International Symposium on
Microarchitecture (MICRO), November 2002.
Winner Best Student Paper Award.
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.