SPEC CPU2006 and Simulation

Research by University of California (San Diego), Intel Corporation, and Ghent University

Simulating large program runs, such as CPU2006 runs with reference input, can be extremely time consuming to the point of being impractical. To address this problem, University of California, San Diego's researchers developed the SimPoint tool to find representative regions based on phase analysis of large program runs. Researchers at Intel developed a dynamic analysis tool-chain based on PinPlay to profile large application runs, to feed the profiles to the SimPoint tool, and to use the resulting region description to create checkpoints for input to Pin-based simulation. Finally, researchers at Ghent University ran the tool-chain on CPU2006 reference runs, created checkpoints ("pinballs") for representative regions ("PinPoints"), and validated the representative nature of the regions using a Pin-based simulator called Sniper. The checkpoints are made available here. They are intended to be used as input to Pin-tools written with Pin-based record/replay toolkit for reproducible analysis.

Please refer to the SPEC Fair Use Rules before using these checkpoints. If used as the basis for prediction of SPEC run time or a SPEC metric, any results published must be very clearly tagged as "Estimated" or "Estimated by simulation of pinballs for representative simulation regions (PinPoints)".