Simics is a full system simulation platform that's extensively used in both academia and industry. This tutorial will describe the next-generation of Simics, in particular the support aimed at the computer architecture academic community. This new generation been developed in partnership with and with extensive input from both academic groups and commercial processor projects.
The general goal of this new generation of Simics is to resolve a number of issues facing academic researchers. These issues include:
The tutorial will address these issues with two broad segments. First we will introduce a set of workloads and techniques for building and managing workloads based on modern commercial operating systems and products. The second major topic is the introduction of the Simics Microarchitect's Toolset (tentative name). The Microarchitect's Toolset is a set of tools developed to allow the microarchitect to model modern processor features in the context of full system simulation. Supported features include out-of-order pipelines, speculation, and prediction. The tutorial will introduce this Toolset with a discussion building a model of a modern processor. Issues covered will include: