FPGA-Accelerated Simulation Technologies (FAST): Fast, Full-System, Cycle-Accurate Simulators

Abstract

This paper describes FAST, a novel simulation methodol- ogy that can produce simulators that (i) are orders of mag- nitude faster than comparable simulators, (ii) are cycle- accurate, (iii) model the entire system running unmodified applications and operating systems, (iv) provide visibility with minimal simulation performance impact and (v) are capable of running current instruction sets such as x86. It achieves its capabilities by partitioning simulators into a speculative functional model component that simulates the instruction set architecture and a timing model com- ponent that predicts performance. The speculative func- tional model enables the simulator to be parallelized, im- plementing the timing model in FPGA hardware for speed and the functional model using a modified full-system simu- lators. We currently achieve an average simulation speed of 1.2MIPS running x86 applications on x86 Linux and Win- dows XP and expect to achieve 10MIPS over time. Such simulators are useful to virtually all computer system sim- ulator users ranging from architects, through RTL design- ers and verifiers to software developers. Sharing a common simulation/design infrastructure could foster better commu- nication between these groups, potentially resulting in bet- ter system designs.