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Mint is a software package designed to ease the process of constructing event-driven memory hierarchy simulators for multiprocessors. It provides a set of simulated processors that run standard Unix executable files compiled for a MIPS R3000 based multiprocessor. These generate multiple streams of memory reference events that drive a user-provided memory system simulator. MINT uses a novel hybrid technique that exploits the best aspects of native execution and software interpretation to minimize the overhead of processor simulation. Combined with related techniques to improve performance, this approach makes simulation on uniprocessor hosts extremely efficient.
MINT reads the
unmodified application executable and creates synthesized
functions in memory at initialization time to simulate blocks
of instructions from the application. MINT runs on SGI
machines, DECstations, and SPARCstations (but always
simulates applications compiled for the MIPS instruction set)
Author: Jack Veenstra (veenstra@cs.rochester.edu)