Efficient Generation of Compact Execution Traces for Multicore Architectural Simulations

Abstract

Requiring no functional simulation, trace-driven simulation has the potential of achieving faster simulation speeds than execution-driven simulation of multicore architectures. An efficient, on-the-fly, high-fidelity trace generation method for multithreaded applications is reported. The generated trace is encoded in an instruction-like binary format that can be directly “interpreted” by a timing simulator to simulate a general load/store or x8-like architecture. A complete tool suite that has been developed and used for evaluation of the proposed method showed that it produces smaller traces over existing trace compression methods while retaining good fidelity including all threading- and synchronization-related events.