TILE-SIM: A Systematic Approach to Systolic Array-based Accelerator Evaluation

The systolic array provides extremely high efficiency for running matrix multiplication, and is one of the mainstream architectures of today’s deep learning accelerators. In order to develop efficient accelerators, people usually employ simulators to make design trade-offs. However, current simulators suffer from coarse-grained modeling methods and ideal assumptions, which limits their ability of describing structural characteristics of systolic arrays. In addition, they do not support the exploration of microarchitecture. This paper presents TILE-SIM, a computing-centric systematic method for evaluating systolic array accelerators by using an event-driven method. TILE-SIM can obtain accurate results and provide the best mapping scheme for different workload due to its fine-grained modeling technique and deny of ideal assumption. Experimental results show that TILE-SIM plays a significant role in design trade-offs and outperforms state-of-the-art simulators, with an accuracy of more than 95%.