At the SC11 supercomputing conference, the Intel Exascience Lab released Sniper, our fast and accurate multi-core simulator, as open source. It is available for download at http://snipersim.org and can be used freely for academic research. Sniper is a next generation parallel, high-speed and accurate x86-64 simulator. This multi-core 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 multi-core architectures. Using this methodology, we are able to achieve good accuracy against hardware for up to 16-threaded 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 raises the level of abstraction in architectural simulation which allows for faster simulator development and evaluation times; it does so by ‘jumping’ between miss events, called intervals. On recent multi-core hardware, we see simulation speeds up to 3 MIPS.

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 show the number of cycles lost due to different characteristics of the system, like the cache hierarchy or branch predictor, and lead to a better understanding of each component’s effect on total system performance.

Visit http://snipersim.org for more information.