  This paper explores the impact of simulator accuracy on architecture design
decisions in the general-purpose graphics processing unit (GPGPU) space. We
perform a detailed, quantitative analysis of the most popular publicly
available GPU simulator, GPGPU-Sim, against our enhanced version of the
simulator, updated to model the memory system of modern GPUs in more detail.
Our enhanced GPU model is able to describe the NVIDIA Volta architecture in
sufficient detail to reduce error in memory system even counters by as much as
66X. The reduced error in the memory system further reduces execution time
error versus real hardware by 2.5X. To demonstrate the accuracy of our enhanced
model against a real machine, we perform a counter-by-counter validation
against an NVIDIA TITAN V Volta GPU, demonstrating the relative accuracy of the
new simulator versus the publicly available model.
  We go on to demonstrate that the simpler model discounts the importance of
advanced memory system designs such as out-of-order memory access scheduling,
while overstating the impact of more heavily researched areas like L1 cache
bypassing. Our results demonstrate that it is important for the academic
community to enhance the level of detail in architecture simulators as system
complexity continues to grow. As part of this detailed correlation and modeling
effort, we developed a new Correlator toolset that includes a consolidation of
applications from a variety of popular GPGPU benchmark suites, designed to run
in reasonable simulation times. The Correlator also includes a database of
hardware profiling results for all these applications on NVIDIA cards ranging
from Fermi to Volta and a toolchain that enables users to gather correlation
statistics and create detailed counter-by-counter hardware correlation plots
with minimal effort.

Hardware Architecture