Architectural Simulation in the Kilo-core Era

The continuos improvements offered by the silicon technology make possible the integration of always increasing number of cores on a single chip. Following this trend, it is expected to approach microprocessor architectures composed of thousands of cores (i.e., kilo-cores architectures) in the next future. In this context simulation tools represent a crucial factor for designing architecture at such core scale. This paper proposes a framework based on the COTSon simulator [2], and able of scaling towards heterogeous kilo-cores architectures. Compared with current state-of the-art architectural simulators, the proposed framework provides full-system simulation, a well balanced trade-off between simulation speed and accuracy, and the support for power consumption estimation. Experimental results confirm the ability of the framework to scale up at least to 2000 cores.