Parallelizing a modern GPU simulator

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Huerta, Rodrigo, González, Antonio
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866915304562491392
author Huerta, Rodrigo
González, Antonio
author_facet Huerta, Rodrigo
González, Antonio
contents Simulators are a primary tool in computer architecture research but are extremely computationally intensive. Simulating modern architectures with increased core counts and recent workloads can be challenging, even on modern hardware. This paper demonstrates that simulating some GPGPU workloads in a single-threaded state-of-the-art simulator such as Accel-sim can take more than five days. In this paper we present a simple approach to parallelize this simulator with minimal code changes by using OpenMP. Moreover, our parallelization technique is deterministic, so the simulator provides the same results for single-threaded and multi-threaded simulations. Compared to previous works, we achieve a higher speed-up, and, more importantly, the parallel simulation does not incur any inaccuracies. When we run the simulator with 16 threads, we achieve an average speed-up of 5.8x and reach 14x in some workloads. This allows researchers to simulate applications that take five days in less than 12 hours. By speeding up simulations, researchers can model larger systems, simulate bigger workloads, add more detail to the model, increase the efficiency of the hardware platform where the simulator is run, and obtain results sooner.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_14691
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Parallelizing a modern GPU simulator
Huerta, Rodrigo
González, Antonio
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Hardware Architecture
Performance
Simulators are a primary tool in computer architecture research but are extremely computationally intensive. Simulating modern architectures with increased core counts and recent workloads can be challenging, even on modern hardware. This paper demonstrates that simulating some GPGPU workloads in a single-threaded state-of-the-art simulator such as Accel-sim can take more than five days. In this paper we present a simple approach to parallelize this simulator with minimal code changes by using OpenMP. Moreover, our parallelization technique is deterministic, so the simulator provides the same results for single-threaded and multi-threaded simulations. Compared to previous works, we achieve a higher speed-up, and, more importantly, the parallel simulation does not incur any inaccuracies. When we run the simulator with 16 threads, we achieve an average speed-up of 5.8x and reach 14x in some workloads. This allows researchers to simulate applications that take five days in less than 12 hours. By speeding up simulations, researchers can model larger systems, simulate bigger workloads, add more detail to the model, increase the efficiency of the hardware platform where the simulator is run, and obtain results sooner.
title Parallelizing a modern GPU simulator
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Hardware Architecture
Performance
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14691