Key features of simulated systems

RSIM provides many configuration parameters to allow the user to simulate a variety of shared-memory multiprocessor and uniprocessor architectures. Key features supported by RSIM are:

Processor features:

• Multiple instruction issue
• Out-of-order (dynamic) scheduling
• Register renaming
• Static and dynamic branch prediction support
• Non-blocking loads and stores
• Speculative load execution before address disambiguation of previous stores
• Simple and optimized memory consistency implementations

Memory hierarchy features:

• Two-level cache hierarchy
• Multiported and pipelined L1 cache, pipelined L2 cache
• Multiple outstanding cache requests
• Memory interleaving
• Software-controlled non-binding prefetching

Multiprocessor system features:

• CC-NUMA shared-memory system with directory-based cache-coherence protocol
• Support for MSI or MESI coherence protocols
• Support for sequential consistency, processor consistency, and release consistency
• Wormhole-routed mesh network

RSIM models contention at all resources in the processor, caches, memory banks, processor-memory bus, and network.