Gem5

Last updated
gem5
Developer(s) Community contributors
Initial releaseAugust 2011;13 years ago (2011-08)
Stable release
v24.1.0.3 / April 11, 2025;2 months ago (2025-04-11)
Repository github.com/gem5/gem5
Written in C++, Python
Operating system Linux, Unix-like
License BSD 3-Clause
Website www.gem5.org

The gem5 simulator is an open source discrete-event computer architecture simulator. [1] It combines system-level and microarchitectural simulation, allowing users to analyze and test a multiplicity of hardware configurations, architectures, and software environments, without access or development of any hardware.

Contents

The simulator is capable of simulating modern operating system running on a simulator system and supports a variety of instruction set architectures (ISAs), including x86, ARM, RISC-V. gem5 comes with a library of pre-made components that conform to a modular design methodology allowing researchers to conduct experiments on a wide systems with relative ease. As such gem5 is used to in research tasks as diverse as processor design, the development of memory subsystems, and application performance optimization. In addition to research, gem5 serves as an important education tool, enabling educators to demonstrate to the impact computer architecture design decisions can have on computer system performance.

History

The gem5 simulator was born out of the merger of m5 (a detailed CPU simulator) and GEMS simulator (a detailed memory system simulator) in 2011. [2]

Features and capabilities

References

  1. Lowe-Power J, Ahmad AM, Akram A, Alian M, Amslinger R, Andreozzi M, Armejach A, Asmussen N, Beckmann B, Bharadwaj S, Black G, Bloom G, Bruce BR, et al. (2020). "The gem5 simulator: Version 20.0+". arXiv: 2007.03152 [cs.AR].
  2. Binkert, Nathan; Sardashti, Somayeh; Sen, Rathijit; Sewell, Korey; Shoaib, Muhammad; Vaish, Nilay; Hill, Mark D.; Wood, David A.; Beckmann, Bradford; Black, Gabriel; Reinhardt, Steven K. (2011-08-31). "The gem5 simulator" . ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News. 39 (2): 1–7. doi:10.1145/2024716.2024718. S2CID   195349294.