Fast End-to-End Performance Simulation of Accelerated Hardware-Software Stacks

The increased use of hardware acceleration has created a need for efficient simulators of the end-to-end performance of accelerated hardware-software stacks: both software and hardware developers need to evaluate the impact of their design choices on overall system performance. However, accurate full-stack simulations are extremely slow, taking hours to simulate just 1 second of real execution. As a result, development of accelerated stacks is non-interactive, and this hurts productivity.

We propose a way to simulate end-to-end performance that is orders-of-magnitude faster yet still accurate. The main idea is to take a minimalist approach: We simulate only those components of the system that are not available, and run the rest natively. Even for unavailable components, we simulate cycleaccurately only aspects that are performance-critical. The key challenge is how to correctly and efficiently synchronize the natively executing components with the simulated ones.

Using this approach, we demonstrate 6× to 879× speedup compared to the state of the art, across three different hardwareaccelerated stacks. The accuracy of simulated time is high: 7% error rate on average and 14% in the worst case, assuming CPU cores are not underprovisioned. Reducing simulation time down to seconds enables interactive development of accelerated stacks, which was until now not possible.