Trace Driven Pipeline and Cache Simulation of Multithreaded Computers

A technique for applying trace-driven simulation to cached multithreaded ma chines with dynamic thread scheduling is presented. A small amount of constraint information is added to each trace record, permitting the correct order of execution in the pipeline to be constructed. Strategies like context switching on a cache miss, in which the behaviour of the cache affects the instruction dispatch order, can be modelled with this technique.

The design of a multithreaded pipeline and cache trace-driven simulation system is described. This system allows thread- scheduled multithreaded processors, which are not simulatable by conventional trace- driven techniques, to be efficiently and accurately simulated. Sample simulation results illustrate the flexibility of this simulation technique.