A Generic Approach to Performance Modeling and Its Applica - tion to Simulator Generator

An integrated environment for performance modeling is desirable in the present era of speci cation driven system design. With the complexity and the number of processors increasing rapidly, it is important to have a generic environment wherein the performance can be measured for a given processor on a given application. In this thesis, a simple, elegant and powerful language Sim-nML has been designed for performance modeling. Sim-nML acts as the speci cation language for a processor performance model in a generic way. As part of this thesis work, a generator for processor instruction set simulator is designed and implemented. The simulator generator takes Sim-nML speci cations of a uniprocessor machine as input and produces code for the simulator. The performance simulator thus generated is an important tool in system design environment as it is useful to study the performance impact due to various design trade-o s. Acknowledgments The greatest debt of gratitude, I reserve for Dr. Rajat Moona who guided me at every stage of this project with his perspicacious suggestions, whose qualities have attracted me a lot. I thank the almighty for giving such a brotherly gure as my guide. This work is done as a part of the ongoing research in Cadence Research Centre at IIT Kanpur. I express my gratitude to Cadence India Ltd. for their enduring support to this work, without which it must have been very di cult to complete this work. I express my heart-felt thanks to all the faculty members for teaching the principles in most exciting and enjoyable way. I wish to thank my old teachers Dr. B. D. Chaudry, Dr. Krishna Kant and Miss Shantha Alis for being the source of inspiration for me. I wish to express my gratitude to Mr. Sakthi Shankar and Mr. Brahmaji Rao, for helping me out in crucial situations. I am greatly indebted to my MTech friends Kataru, Dhanabal, Ramaswamy, Raja, Balaji, Gomes, Murali, Joye, Senthan, Venkat and all my BTech friends especially Aravindan, Nori, Ravi, Anand Kammanavar, Madan, Visu, Ezhil and Thambies for being a ectionate and encouraging. Without them my college life must have got deserted. I thank all my MTech96 batch-mates especially Yugandhar, Kshitiz, Atul for their exciting company. Finally, I wish I could express my thankfulness in words, to my parents, my family, Pavithra and Sahana for their love and a ection I have been receiving. i