Main memory latency simulation: The missing link

The community accepted the need for a detailed simulation of main memory. Currently, the CPU simulators are usually coupled with the cycle-accurate main memory simulators. However, coupling CPU and memory simulators is not a straight-forward task because some pieces of the circuitry between the last level cache and the memory DIMMs could be easily overlooked and therefore not accounted for. In this paper, we take an approach to quantify the missing cycles in the main memory simulation. To that end, we execute a memory intensive microbenchmark to validate a simulation infrastructure based on ZSim and DRAMsim2 modeling an Intel Sandy Bridge E5-2670 system. We execute the same microbenchmark on a real Sandy Bridge E5-2670 machine identifying a missing 20 ns in the simulator measurements. This is a huge difference that, in the system under study, corresponds to one-third of the overall main memory latency. We propose multiple schemes to add an extra delay in the simulation model to account for the missing cycles. Furthermore, we validate the proposals using the SPEC CPU2006 benchmarks. Finally, we repeat the main memory latency measurements on seven mainstream and emerging computing platforms. Our results show that latency between the Last Level Cache (LLC) and the main memory ranges between tens and hundreds of nanoseconds, so we emphasize on properly adjust and validate these parameters in system simulators before any measurements are performed. Overall, we believe this study would improve main memory simulation leading to the better overall system analysis and explorations performed in the computer architecture community.