Call for Papers

The ALF research group at INRIA Rennes (http://www.irisa.fr/caps) is opening a PhD position on the following topic:

Fast hybrid multicore architecture simulation:

So far, detailed cycle-accurate simulation has been the preferred methodology for research in microarchitecture. However, with the advent of multicore processors and the rapid growth of the number of on-chip cores, cycle accurate simulation is becoming more and more impractical, as it requires a lot of development and leads to slow and heavy simulators.

Some researchers have begun exploring hybrid simulation methods where some or all cores are modeled approximately, while detailed simulation is used elsewhere, in particular for the network and the caches. Simulation speedups of up to several orders of magnitude have been reported. However, the accuracy levels obtained so far are not completely convincing, essentially because core models are too crude.

The goal of this thesis is to define a fast and accurate hybrid simulation methodology for simulating the execution of parallel applications on future multicore processors.

Contacts:

Pierre Michaud (pmichaud@irisa.fr)

or Andre Seznec (seznec@irisa.fr)