RSIM – (Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessor)

RSIM – (Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessor) simulator was developed at Rice University Houston Texas, USA. The RSIM is an event driven simulator. It serves for the analysis of the shared memory multiprocessor and for the single processor systems with instruction level parallelism. The simulator has advanced fixed architecture, with possibility to write code in assembly language. In presented CPU architecture, ILP has been used in combination with characteristics of currently available processors, but it is closest to the MIPS R10000. Beside an advanced pipeline, single processor and multiprocessor memory system included a two level cache hierarchy. User writes code in assembly language with an instruction set similar to the SPARC V9 instruction set. This code is then complied, linked, prerecorded, and then simulated. During simulation user can monitor following information: usual pipeline time-table, instructions in each pipeline phase, in time for each clock and stall cycle. Besides monitoring, it is possible to generate customized simulation statistics, that can include data for different simulation phases. This simulator was developed using C and C++ programming languages. Code for the memory system was extracted from RPPT (the Rice Parallel Processing Testbed). The RSIM interprets application executables by using discrete event simulation library YACSIM. This simulator can be used on following operating systems: SUN ULTRASPARC work stations, SUN SparcStations, and SGI PowerChallenge systems. It is possible to port simulator to other UNIX compatible platforms. The RSIM is primarily designed for studying shared-memory multiprocessor architectures built from processors that aggressively exploit instruction level parallelism (ILP) [14, 32]. Students and researchers can use this simulator for their work. This simulator has been used as research tool and in teaching courses of computer architecture including single processors and multiprocessors systems on graduate and post graduate studies at Rice University Houston Texas, USA.