School of Informatics - University of Edinburgh Institute for Computing Systems Architecture - School of Informatics
Institute for Computing
Systems Architecture

Statistical Performance Modeling in Functional Instruction Set Simulators

    Journal Paper - Statistical Performance Modeling in Functional Instruction Set Simulators
  • Type: Journal Paper
  • Authors:
    B. Franke.
  • ACM Transactions on Embedded Computing Systems (TECS).
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  • Abstract:

    Despite the recent progress in improving the speed of instruction-accurate simulators cycle-accurate simulation is still prohibitively slow for all but the most basic programs. In this article we present a statistical machine learning approach to performance estimation in fast, instruction-accurate simulators and evaluate our methodology comprehensively against three popular embedded RISC processors and about 300 embedded applications. We show that our methodology is capable of providing accurate performance estimations with an average error of less than 3.9% while, on average, operating ~ 14.5 times faster than cycle-accurate simulation.