RSIM x86 is a port of the widely used RSIM performance simulator for cc-NUMA multiprocessors to GNU/Linux and x86 hardware.
Doing research or system design in computer architecture involves deciding among many interrelated tradeoffs. Computer architecture is increasingly driven by quantitative data. Usually, developers can devise analytical models to bound the design space in the very early development stages but the interactions between many design decisions in today increasingly complex systems make impossible to use these analytical models to accurately predict the performance of a finished system. Hence, we need experimental models in order to guess the performance impact of a possible design decision before building a finished system.
Performance simulators are complex software systems which accurately model the behavior of a hardware system.
RSIM is a simulator primarily targeted to study shared-memory cache coherent (cc-NUMA) multiprocessor architectures built from processors that aggressively exploit instruction-level parallelism (ILP).
RSIM key advantage is that it models a system comprised by several out-of-order processors which aggressively exploit instruction level parallelism (ILP). The model includes an aggressive memory system and a scalable interconnection network. Using detailed ILP models for the simulated processors provides a realistic approximation to modern and future multiprocessor systems. RSIM provides a great flexibility which allows using it to simulate a range of systems from monoprocessors to different cc-NUMA configurations.
We have ported RSIM to GNU/Linux running on x86 hardware to obtain an increased performance for our simulations at a fraction of the original cost.
The purpose of our port of RSIM is to allow us to use our research resources more efficiently. Prior to the port, the small number of available machines to develop and run our simulations created long waiting queues and serious organizational problems.
Using a RSIM version which runs on cheap and readily available x86 hardware allows us to provide each researcher with its own workstation to comfortably develop and test his experiments and use an inexpensive cluster of Linux/x86 machines to execute the longest simulations. The x86 version not only executes each benchmark faster, but more importantly, it is easier to provide more resources to increase the throughput of the whole team.
This work has been supported by the Spanish Ministry of Ciencia y Tecnología and the European Union (Feder Funds) under grant TIC2003-08154-C06-03, and by fellowship 01090/FPI/04 from the Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia (Fundación Séneca, Agencia Regional de Ciencia y Tecnología).
Last updated: June, 16th 2005.