Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dbancajas 2200 days ago
> ewers ever saw the code involved. Thi

There are a lot of papers in ISCA that are based on cycle-accurate simulators. It has been like that since forever. How else would you evaluate new non-existent architectures that are bleeding-edge? FPGA? Most can't even afford that. Not to mention it's just not possible in a lot of cases. I agree with you that some work should be verifiable but your accusation is weak for this part. Maybe the community can push for verifiable work before getting published in ISCA since it is such a prestigious conference.

If you don't want cycle-accurate simulator based papers, you'd have to eliminate a large variety of body of work only possible with this approach. A lot of techniques in modern processors have seen their start in processor/system simulators and most of them are probably not cycle-accurate.

1 comments

> If you don't want cycle-accurate simulator based papers, you'd have to eliminate a large variety of body of work only possible with this approach.

yes. Most "cycle-accurate" results are garbage. Do you show error bars on your results? Can you? Did you run on a variety of independently implemented simulators and show the results on all of them? Did you run the full reference inputs to SPEC all the way through? Why not?

The answer seems to be that it would be hard. But guess what, science is hard. Try complaining to a biologist sometime about your architecture paper that took so long to write, where you gathered all the results 2 weeks before the paper deadline.

It's fine if you come up with a new idea and run some simple proof-of-concept runs to show it might have merit, but don't pretend the results from an academic simulator hacked together by a sleep-deprived grad student have any real world merit.

omg running ref spec on gem5 fs mode...