The Sniper Multi-Core Simulator
Sniper is a next generation multi-threaded, high-speed and accurate x86-64 simulator. This microarchitectural simulator is based on the interval core model and the Graphite simulation infrastructure, allowing for fast and accurate simulation and for trading off simulation speed for accuracy to allow a range of flexible simulation options when exploring different micro-architectures. Using this methodology, we are able to achieve good accuracy against hardware for 16-thread applications.
The Sniper simulator allows one to perform timing simulations for multi-threaded, shared-memory applications with 10s to 100+ cores, at a high speed when compared to existing simulators. The main feature of the simulator is its core model which is based on the interval core model, a fast mechanistic core model. The interval model allows for faster simulations than typical cycle-accurate simulators by jumping between miss events because of long-latency operations. On recent machines, we see speeds of up to 2 MIPS for SPLASH-2 benchmarks, and almost 3 MIPS for SPEC OMP benchmarks.
This simulator, and the interval core model, is useful for uncore and system-level studies that require more detail than the typical one-IPC models. As an added benefit, the interval core model allows the generation of CPI stacks, which shows the number of cycles lost due to different characteristics of the system, like the cache hierarchy or branch predictor, to be easily understood.
Features
In addition to the main features mentioned above, we have updated the base simulation infrastructure to allow for simulating a larger set of workloads on more recent simulated hardware. Here is the full set of some of the recently added features:
- Interval core model
- CPI Stacks to gain insight into lost cycles
- Parallel, multithreaded simulator
- Multithreaded application support, x86-64, SSE2
- Validated against the Intel Core 2 and Nehalem/Westmere microarchitectures
- Full DVFS support
- Shared and private caches
- Modern branch predictor
- Supports parallel applications using pthreads, OpenMP, TBB, OpenCL
- Runs SPLASH-2, Rodinia, SPEC OMP and most of PARSEC
- SimAPI and Python interfaces for monitoring and controlling the simulator's behavior at runtime
- Easy debugging of applications and the simulator
- Multiple Linux-OS support (Redhat/Debian/Ubuntu/etc.)
- Open source software, licensed under the MIT and the Interval Academic License
- Additional features
You can find additional information on the simulator and its components in our recently accepted SC'11 paper Sniper - Exploring the Level of Abstraction for Scalable and Accurate Parallel Multi-Core Simuation.
Getting started
- Download the Sniper source code
- Follow the Getting Started instructions
Discussion list
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Please send any questions or comments to: snipersim [at] groups [dot] google [dot] com . You can also visit our Google Groups page to subscribe to the list and search through the archive of previous messages.
Team Members
- Trevor E. Carlson with the Intel ExaScience Lab and Ghent University
- Wim Heirman with the Intel ExaScience Lab and Ghent University
- Lieven Eeckhout with Ghent University
More information
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