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

Using Continuous Statistical Machine Learning to Enable High-Speed Performance Prediction in Hybrid Instruction-/Cycle-Accurate Instruction Set Simulators

    Paper - Using Continuous Statistical Machine Learning to Enable High-Speed Performance Prediction in Hybrid Instruction-/Cycle-Accurate Instruction Set Simulators
  • Type: Paper
  • Authors:
    D. Powell and B. Franke.
  • Proceedings of the International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES-ISSS), Grenoble, France, October 11-16, 2009.
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  • Abstract:

    Functional instruction set simulators perform instruction-accurate simulation of benchmarks at high instruction rates. Unlike their slower, but cycle-accurate counterparts however, they are not capable of providing cycle counts due to the higher level of hardware abstraction. In this paper we present a novel approach to performance prediction based on statistical machine learning utilising a hybrid instruction- and cycle-accurate simulator. We introduce the concept of continuous machine learning to simulation whereby new training data points are acquired on demand and used for on-the-fly updates of the performance model. Furthermore, we show how statistical regression can be adapted to reduce the cost of these updates during a performance-critical simulation. For a state-of-the-art simulator modelling the ARC 750D embedded processor we demonstrate that our approach is highly accurate, with average error <2.5% whilst achieving a speed-up of approx. 50% over the baseline cycle-accurate simulation.