An Architectural Level Main Memory Simulator for 
Emerging Non-Volatile Memories

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#Sections

1. Overview
2. Building ramulator-NVMain
Trace Simulation
3. Running ramulator-NVMain
4. Configuring ramulator-NVMain
5. Hacking ramulator-NVMain
6. README Changelog

1. Overview

   ramulator-NVMain is a cycle accurate main memory simulator designed to simulate emerging non-volatile memories at the architectural level. Since the current status of non-volatile memory is unknown and this is a research tool, flexability is provided to implement different variations of memory controllers, interconnects, organizations, etc. Ramulator as our processor, in CPU trace-driven mode. CPU traces are collected using a Pintool. To model the stacked and the off-chip DRAM memory we have integrated a detailed main memory simulator - NVMain. We use NVMain to obtain Latency and hit rate results of the DRAM cache subsystem. We feed NVMain with DRAM command traces obtained from our simulations using Ramulator.

   Thanks for trying ramulator-NVMain!

2. Building ramulator-NVMain

   ramulator-NVMain can be build as a standalone executable to run trace-based simulations.

   Trace Simulation

   The trace simulation can be build using scons:

   $ scons --build-type=[release|debug]

   Compiling with scons will automatically set the compile flags needed for trace-based simulation. You can use --build-type=debug to add debugging symbol, or release for -03 optimization.

3. Running ramulator-NVMain

   NVMain can be run on the command line with trace-based simulation via:

   ./nvmain CONFIG_FILE TRACE_FILE

   eg. cd ramulator-NVMain scons ./nvmain.fast Tests/Configs/LO.config ../Trace/403.gcc

   The CONFIG_FILE is the path to the configuration file for the memory system being simulated. The TRACE_FILE is the path to the trace file with the memory requests to simulate. Cycles is optional and specifies the max number of cycles to simulate. By default the entire trace file is simulated.

4. Configuring ramulator-NVMain

   ramulator-NVMain can be configured using the configuration files. Several example configuration files can be found in the Config/ folder in the ramulator-NVMain trunk.

5. Hacking ramulator-NVMain

   As mentioned in the overview, ramulator-NVMain is meant to be flexible. Writing your own interconnect, memory controller, endurance model, address translator, etc. Can be done by creating a new C++ file with your new class.

   Each unit has a Factory class which selects the class to used based on the configuration file input. You can create a class by looking at one of the example classes in each folder:

   MemControl - Custom Memory Controllers FaultModels - Custom hard-fault models Decoders - Custom address translators Endurance - Custom Endurance models Interconnect - Custom Interconnects Prefetchers - Custom prefetchers SimInterface - Simulator interface used to gather useful statistics from the CPU simulator such as instructions executed, cache miss rates, etc. traceReader - Custom trace file readers

   When adding a class, make sure to update the factory class to #include your class header and to initialize your class if the configuration is set to your class' name.

9/08/2016 - Created first README