• NrcArch
• 2006-06-12

Full System Simulation

• Arvind, Krste Asanovic, Gopal Raghavan, Jae, Steve, Soracha, Nirav, Chris, Jamey, John

What kind of simulators

• System composed of units connected by channels (pairs of FIFOs)
• Configuration, control, and reset may be outside FIFO

Levels of Fidelity of Simulation

• Untimed transactions / untimed channels
• Untimed transactions / timed channels (good for modeling system bandwidth requirements)
• Timed transactions / timed channels
• RTL (every state bit / every cycle)
• Gate level

Simulation Tradeoffs

• Flexibility
• Speed
• Fidelity

Kinds of Experiments

• Behavior: what does it do
• Time: how long does it take to run
• Power/Energy (transaction firings, bits/channel feed into power model)

Ari Salomaki's frontend vs backend discussion

• Task graph is a different kind of model than the structural simulations that we talked about
• It can interact with the hardware model
• It is a different kind of model