I just read a short paper by Antoine Trouvé and Kazuaki Murakami from the RAPIDO 2010 workshop on “rapid simulation and performance evaluation”. The paper is “FFast: Efficient Application of Compiled Simulation Techniques To A Fast ISS Over a Virtual Machine”. It explores the interesting idea of how an existing virtual machine infrastructure can be used to build a fast instruction-set simulator, and in the extension, a full system simulator.
To me, this idea is worth exploring, since using a mature VM like the .net CLR (used in this paper) or a JVM would offer a shortcut to get high-quality code generation for a JIT compiler. It could also offer other benefits, as these environments support many advanced configuration and management features. I have touched on this topic before, in the posts “Dream ESL Language” (VM as the basis for a simulator) and “The JVM as Universal Parallel Glue” (that a common VM can offer huge benefits for an ecosystem).
Continue reading “FFast: Good Idea, Too Bad About the Implementation”