Microarchitectural Exploration with Liberty
Authors:
Manish Vachharajani, Neil Vachharajani, David Penry, Jason A. Blome, David
I. August.
Departments of Electrical Engineers and Computer Science
Princeton University
Princeton, NJ
Abstract:
To find the best designs, architects must rapidly simulate many design
alternatives and have confidence in the results. Unfortunately, the
most prevalent simulator construction methodology, hand-writing
monolithic simulators in sequential programming languages, yields
simulators that are hard to retarget, limiting the number of designs
explored, and hard to understand, instilling little confidence in the
model. Simulator construction tools have been developed to address
these problems, but analysis reveals that they do not address the root
cause, the error-prone mapping between the concurrent, structural
hardware domain and the sequential, functional software domain. This
paper presents an analysis of these problems and their solution, the
Liberty Simulation Environment (LSE). LSE automatically constructs a
simulator from a machine description that closely resembles the
hardware, ensuring fidelity in the model. Furthermore, through a
strict but general component communication contract, LSE enables the
creation of highly reusable component libraries, easing the task of
rapidly exploring ever more exotic designs.
Web Site:
http://liberty.princeton.edu