QFlex 3.0: Near-GIPS Full-System Server Simulation
(MICRO 2025 Tutorial)

Time:   1:00 PM KST – 5:00 PM KST
Venue: Room 3

    Instructions on how to run QFlex are available here

    Description

    Modern servers contain multiple sockets, hundreds of cores, and terabytes of memory, running containerized workloads with intricate user-kernel interactions that execute billions of instructions per second. Yet, cycle-accurate simulators operate at only a few hundred thousand instructions per second (KIPS), making it infeasible to simulate even tens of seconds of simulation without requiring months of host computation. Therefore researchers are often pushed to make trade-offs between accuracy and performance.

    Statistical sampling mitigates this challenge by reducing the time required for cycle-accurate simulation by three orders of magnitude, utilizing functional simulation to fast-forward through the remaining execution while ensuring accuracy through statistically guaranteed confidence levels. In this tutorial, we present QFlex 3.0, a full-system simulator, that for the first time offers first-class support for statistical sampling and reusable checkpoints, enabling near-GIPS simulation speed and reducing evaluation time for large ARM server workloads from months to mere hours.

    Please check the MICRO 2025 website for more information on attending our tutorial. The tutorial will be on October 19th (in the afternoon).

    We hope to see you all at MICRO 2025!