This chapter describes performance scaling features provided by Simics. To get the best performance out of Simics you should also read the Performance chapter for general information about better Simics performance.
This chapter talks about two major features: parallel simulation and page sharing. Parallel simulation allows you to use multithreading to speed up simulation on multiprocessor hosts. Parallel simulation works both at the machine (cell) level, called Simics® Multimachine Accelerator and at the processor level, called Multicore Accelerator. Multicore Accelerator is new in Simics 5. Multimachine Accelerator was known simply as multithreading in earlier Simics versions, but has been renamed to reflect that we have multiple types of multithreading in Simics 5.
You can also split the simulation and run it distributed across more than one host machine.
Page sharing finds identical memory pages and shares them to decrease memory consumption and increase execution performance. This is particularly useful when you have several machines running the same software.