World Models for Microarchitectural Design Space Exploration

Overview

With the rising adoption of ML for design space exploration, current approaches to simulating designs with meaningful fidelity have become a substantial bottleneck for the number of designs that ML-based approaches can evaluate when exploring the design space. This project examines whether world models may offer a faster alternative to traditional approaches to detailed microarchtiectural simulation while maintaining enough fidelity to converge on good designs.

My Contributions

• Designing a transformer-based world model for microarchitectural state capable of modeling how execution of a given workload affects state across various microarchitectural configurations.
• Conducted a motivational study on the need for faster simulators to support emerging ML-based techniques for design space exploration in computer architecture.