Darsim: A Parallel Cycle-Level NoC Simulator

Abstract

We present DARSIM, a parallel, highly configurable, cycle-level network-on-chip simulator based on an ingress-queued wormhole router architecture. The parallel simulation engine offers cycle-accurate as well as periodic synchronization, permitting tradeoffs between perfect accuracy and high speed with very good accuracy. When run on four separate physical cores, speedups can exceed a factor of 3.5, while when eight threads are mapped to the same cores via hyperthreading, simulation speeds up as much as five-fold. Most hardware parameters are configurable, including geometry, bandwidth, crossbar dimensions, and pipeline depths. A highly parametrized table-based design allows a variety of routing and virtual channel allocation algorithms out of the box, ranging from simple DOR routing to complex Valiant, ROMM, or PROM schemes, BSOR, and adaptive routing. DARSIM can run in network-only mode using traces or directly emulate a MIPS-based multicore. Sources are freely available under the open-source MIT license.