Evaluating ATTILA, a cycle-accurate GPU simulator Miguel Ángel Martínez del Amor Department of Computer and Information Science Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
[email protected] Project supervisor: Lasse Natvig
[email protected] 26 th January 2007 Abstract. As GPUs’ technology grow more and more, new simulators are needed to help on the task of designing new architectures. Simulators have several advantages compared to an implementation directly in hardware, so they are very useful in GPU development. ATTILA is a new GPU simulator that was born to provide a framework for working with real OpenGL applications, simulating at the same time a GPU that has an architecture similar to the current designs of the major GPU vendors like NVIDIA or ATI. This architecture is highly configurable, and also ATTILA gives a lot of statistics and information about what occurred into the simulated GPU during the execution. This project will explain the main aspects of this simulator, with an evaluation of this tool that is young but powerful and helpful for researchers and developers of new GPUs. 1. Introduction The main brain of computers is the CPU (Central Processing Unit), where the instructions are executed, manipulating by this way the data stored in memory. But with the new applications that demand even more resources, the CPU is becoming a bottleneck. There is a lot of works about how to improve the CPI (Cycles per Instruction) which is a good parameter for making comparisons between uniprocessor architectures, and the search for parallelism is the best way to do it.