Analysis and optimization of the system-level simulator

Simulator is a software system running on the host and the behaviour of the simulated target architecture machine. It can explain and execute the executable program on the target architecture machine, while providing run-time instruction and event-related records, as well as the performance of statistical parameters of the target architecture machine. Systemlevel architecture simulator can be used as a virtual target machine running the software system can achieve the functional simulation of the single (multi) processor, system memory, cache, and an external device subsystem. The simulator is an important means for the processor architecture. Accurate simulation of the processor architecture can access and analyze the architecture parameters on the performance of the processor, to provide effective support for the architecture design space exploration. Simulator development purposes and a different focus, vary widely in speed, uses simulation target, degree of simulation. This article is based on the characteristics of different workloads to study the performance of several state-of-art system-level architecture simulators and focuses on the method that can improve the system performance significantly. We take SPLASH-2 as the benchmark to test the performance of these representative system-level architecture simulators. Finally we give a summary on the optimization methods of different kinds of simulators.