PLDI Practice Talk

["Mark D. Hill" <markhill@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Please consider attending Schnarr's PLDI01 practice talk on
Monday June 11th at 400pm in 5331 CSS.

--Mark


Facile: A Language and Compiler For
High-Performance Processor Simulators

Eric C. Schnarr, Mark D. Hill, & James R. Larus

Architectural simulators are essential tools for computer architecture
and systems research and development. Simulators, however, are becoming
frustratingly slow, because they must now model increasingly complex
micro-architectures running realistic workloads. Previously, we developed
a technique called fast-forwarding, which applied partial evaluation
and memoization to improve the performance of detailed architectural
simulations by as much as an order of magnitude.

While writing a detailed processor simulator is difficult, implementing
fast-forwarding is even more complex. This paper describes Facile, a
domain-specific language for writing detailed, accurate micro-architecture
simulators. Architectural descriptions written in Facile can be compiled,
using partial evaluation techniques, into fast-forwarding simulators that
achieve significant performance improvements with far less programmer
effort. Facile and its compiler make this performance-enhancing technique
accessible to computer architects.