Towards fast and flexible simulation of network processors
Z. Liu, David Bermingham, Xiaojun Wang · China-Ireland International Conference on Information and Communications Technologies (CIICT 2008) · 2008
Network processor (NP) has emerged as a successful platform for the implementation of network applications. Since most of them have adopted an architecture that is different from general purpose processors, this has raised the demand of a fast and flexible simulator for network processors. In this paper, we present a simulator called simplified network processor simulator (Sim2NP). It models the typical features of NPs, including multiple processing cores, integrated memory controller and networking interface. The simulator is designed in a manner that applications can be easily implemented in C programming language with almost no modification to commercially available compilers. Moreover, new features can also be easily added into this simulator. Experiments have shown that our simulator runs at comparable speed with SimpleScalar. Applications can be easily implemented on our simulator and it can provide abundant information for the study of NPs.