Rapid Architectural Design and Validation Using Program-Driven Simulations

We describe key features of a simulation environment, MORPHSIM, that allows us to quickly evaluate the e ect of architectural changes on application runtimes. We discuss the e ect of runtime interpretation, and describe how the MORPHSIM simulator is able to achieve signi cant speedup in architectural evaluation by minimizing the use of interpretation over a programdriven simulation. This environment is currently being used to design a customizable system architecture built using recon gurable hardware blocks [1]. We present early simulation results that highlight the utility of the simulation environment in system design.