Midas: An FPGA-based Architecture Simulator for Multiprocessors

We present Midas, an economical FPGA-based architecture simulator that allows rapid early design-space exploration of manycore systems. Midas models target-system timing and functionality separately, and it employs hostmultithreading for an efficient FPGA implementation. It is a high-throughput, cycle-accurate full-system simulator, capable of booting real operating systems. The Midas prototype runs on a single Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA board and simulates a 64-core shared-memory target machine. We evaluate its performance using a modern parallel benchmark suite running on our manycore research operating system, achieving two orders of magnitude speedup compared to a widely-used software-based architecture simulator.