A simulator and compiler framework for agile hardware-software co-design evaluation and exploration

Abstract

As Moore's Law has slowed and Dennard Scaling has ended, architects are increasingly turning to heterogeneous parallelism and hardware-software co-design. These trends present new challenges for simulation-based performance assessments that are central to early-stage architectural exploration. Simulators must be lightweight to support heterogeneous combinations of general-purpose cores and specialized processing units. They must also support agile exploration of hardware-software co-design, i.e. changes in the programming model, compiler, ISA, and specialized hardware.

To meet these challenges, we describe our compiler and simulator pair: DEC++ and MosaicSim. Together, they provide a lightweight, modular simulator for heterogeneous systems, offering accuracy and agility designed specifically for hardware-software co-design explorations. The simulator and corresponding compiler were developed as part of the DECADES project, a multi-team effort to design and tape out a new heterogeneous architecture. We will present two case-studies in important data-science applications where DEC++ and MosaicSim enable straightforward design space explorations for emerging full-stack systems.