

Methodologies that have been employed to validate and compare simulation frameworks are usually limited to comparing CPI and cache statistics and do not provide a detailed function-level breakdown or understanding of the source of mismatches. In addition, more recent simulation environments use Dynamic Binary Instrumentation (DBI) traces collected on the system context (OS, library, threading API) of the host system. Resource use between simulation environments vary widely because of these different system contexts and the fact that multi-threaded applications have intrinsic. Contemporary simulation environments are now increasingly complex comprising of support for multiple cores and full operating systems.

Simulation is employed extensively to perform exploration of design spaces by computer designers.
