NeuroScalar: A Deep Learning Framework for Fast, Accurate, and In-the-Wild Cycle-Level Performance Prediction
This addresses the bottleneck in microprocessor design evaluation for hardware engineers, enabling fast and accurate in-the-wild performance prediction.
The paper tackles the slow and unrepresentative simulation of microprocessor designs by introducing a deep learning framework that predicts cycle-level performance using microarchitecture-independent features, achieving a simulation speed of 5 MIPS with only 0.1% overhead and an 85x improvement with a co-designed accelerator.
The evaluation of new microprocessor designs is constrained by slow, cycle-accurate simulators that rely on unrepresentative benchmark traces. This paper introduces a novel deep learning framework for high-fidelity, ``in-the-wild'' simulation on production hardware. Our core contribution is a DL model trained on microarchitecture-independent features to predict cycle-level performance for hypothetical processor designs. This unique approach allows the model to be deployed on existing silicon to evaluate future hardware. We propose a complete system featuring a lightweight hardware trace collector and a principled sampling strategy to minimize user impact. This system achieves a simulation speed of 5 MIPS on a commodity GPU, imposing a mere 0.1% performance overhead. Furthermore, our co-designed Neutrino on-chip accelerator improves performance by 85x over the GPU. We demonstrate that this framework enables accurate performance analysis and large-scale hardware A/B testing on a massive scale using real-world applications.