Program Behavior Analysis Method with High Accuracy

Simulation is a very important way to computer architecture research. To reduce simulation time, the dynamic binary translation (DBT) technique has bee proposed to extract representative simulation points of programs. The performance characteristics of programs can then be obtained by simulating only the extracted representative simulation points. However, the accuracy implications of the DBT method have not been studied. For some programs, the DBT method can incur a nearly 20% error in the simulation results. In this paper, the cause of the execution trace deviation is studied carefully and several methods are proposed to overcome the problem. Experimental results show that with the proposed methods, the accuracy of the DBT method is the same as the simulation method.