A Multiprocessor Simulator With Power Analysis Based On Simplescalar

To meet the requirements of more and more complex applications, there has been a common sense that in the near future there will be hundred and thousand processing elements in a single chip. There are already several multicore processors in market. However there still exits many challenges in hardware design, software design, and everything between. Among all those challenges, low power design and thermal management have been the most important. Multiple processing elements on one single chip make the lower power a critical problem.Low power design involves corporation of different levels, from operation system, algorithm level, system level, and circuit level. Design in different level can have different effect. The more abstract is the design level, the more effective.A multiprocessor with power model forms a good start of such research. This paper implements such a simulator based on the well-known single core simulator SimpleScalar and power model Wattch. It can carry out detailed analysis of both performance and power.The computation of Wattch slows down the simulation speed to a great extent. We brought our interesting discussion and experiments and finally came out a solution to solve the problem.All our simulation has been implemented on Linux. System C language is used to encapsulate the single PISA core so it is easy to add or remove a core. We have carried out different experiments to demonstrate the effectiveness of our simulator. We also did a job partition for JPEG decoding. It is demonstrated that our multiprocessor simulator with power model works well and produce interesting results. The simulator can be used as platform for research in computer architecture, power and thermal aware design, software parallelizing, etc.