Pipeline behavior prediction for superscalar processors by abstract interpretation

Abstract

For real time systems not only the logical function is important but also the timing behavior, e. g. hard real time systems must react inside their deadlines. To guarantee this it is necessary to know upper bounds for the worst case execution times (WCETs). The accuracy of the prediction of WCETs depends strongly on the ability to model the features of the target processor.Cache memories, pipelines and parallel functional units are architectural components which are responsible for the speed gain of modern processors. It is not trivial to determine their influence when predicting the worst case execution time of programs.This paper describes a method to predict the behavior of pipelined superscalar processors and reports initial results of a prototypical implementation for the SuperSPARC I processor.