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SMASim Manual, version 1.0

Jari-Matti Mäkelä, Jani Paakkulainen, Ville Leppänen, SMASim Manual, version 1.0. TUCS Technical Reports 972, Turku Centre for Computer Science, 2010.

Abstract:

The computer industry has faced a constant need for more efficient hardware to perform
computational tasks. Previous generations of microchips have tried to mitigate the
problem on three fronts: increasing the execution speed by increasing the operating
frequency, decreasing the amount of required time to issue a single instruction by
enhancing instruction level parallelism, and increasing the “computational volume” by
adding more computational units. Developing new architectures has turned out to be
expensive and requires relatively great amount of resources even when building
experimental FPGA prototypes.

SMASim is a software based simulator, motivated by an experimental moving threads
architecture, that attempts to lower the costs of rapidly designing new architectures. It is
based on a general purpose, precise latency centric message passing framework
between the described hardware architecture elements. Its relatively simple cost model
captures the essential properties of many hardware designs. The simulator’s design
allows easy monitoring of the system and provides execution performance comparable
to other cycle-accurate hardware simulators. The implementation is cycle-accurate,
modular, and supports simulation on various granularity levels.

The simulator is implemented in hybrid object-functional language Scala. The flexibility
of Scala allows using declarative domain specific notation when specifying parts of the
architecture, yet it provides a static verification of the model via a strong type system. A
graphical user interface is provided to simplify the task of modifying parameters of a
simulated system and to provide interactive feedback.

Files:

Full publication in PDF-format

BibTeX entry:

@TECHREPORT{tMaPaLe10a,
  title = {SMASim Manual, version 1.0},
  author = {Mäkelä, Jari-Matti and Paakkulainen, Jani and Leppänen, Ville},
  number = {972},
  series = {TUCS Technical Reports},
  publisher = {Turku Centre for Computer Science},
  year = {2010},
  keywords = {multi-core, simulator, cycle-accurate, domain specific language},
  ISBN = {978-952-12-2425-6},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Algorithmics and Computational Intelligence Group (ACI)

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