Fast multicore simulators are extremely useful in evaluating design alternatives and enabling early software development. Among the state-of-the-art multicore simulators, Simics is a very popular used one both in academia and industry. It has a powerful debugging system, and also provides an accelerator to support multithreaded or distributed simulation. However, this kind of parallel mechanism mainly aims at speed up distributed systems. It is not suitable for the shared-memory multicore systems which are much more commonly used. In this paper, we propose a novel parallel mechanism to improve the simulation speed of shared-memory multicore systems. More importantly, our approach is compatible with other optimizations and exist debugging systems used in Simics. Experimental results show that our parallel approach achieves an average speedup of 9.6× (up to 12.2×) when running SPLASH-2 kernel on a 16-core host machine.
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