electronics Article EPSim-C: A Parallel Epoch-Based Cycle-Accurate Microarchitecture Simulator Using Cloud Computing Minseong Kim 1, Seon Wook Kim 1 and Youngsun Han 2,* 1 Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Korea University, Seoul 02841, Korea;
[email protected] (M.K.);
[email protected] (S.W.K.) 2 Department of Electronic Engineering, Kyungil University, Gyeongsan 38428, Korea * Correspondence:
[email protected]; Tel.: +82-53-600-5549 Received: 28 May 2019; Accepted: 19 June 2019; Published: 24 June 2019 Abstract: Recently, computing platforms have been being configured on a large scale to satisfy the diverse requirements of emerging applications like big data and graph processing, neural network, speech recognition and so on. In these computing platforms, each computing node consists of a multicore, an accelerator, and a complex memory hierarchy, which are connected to other nodes using a variety of high-performance networks. Up to now, researchers have been using cycle-accurate simulators to evaluate the performance of computer systems in detail. However, the execution of the simulators, which models modern computing architecture for multi-core, multi-node, datacenter, memory hierarchy, new memory, and new interconnection, is too slow and infeasible; since the architecture has become more complex today, the complexity of the simulator is rapidly increasing. Therefore, it is seriously challenging to employ them in the research and development of next-generation computer systems. To solve this problem, we previously presented EPSim (Epoch-based Simulator), which defines epochs that can be run independently by dividing the simulation run into several sections and executes them in parallel on a multicore platform, resulting in only the limited simulation speedup.