Facile: A Language and Compiler for High-Performance Processor Simulators

Abstract

Architectural simulators are essential tools for computer architecture and systems research and development. Simulators, however, are becoming frustratingly slow, because they must now model increasingly complex micro-architectures running realistic workloads. Previously, we developed a technique called fast-forwarding, which applied partial evaluation and mermoization to improve the performance of detailed architectural simulations by as much as an order of magnitude [14].