A Comparison of Two Approaches to Parallel Simulation of Multiprocessors

— The design trend towards CMPs has made the simulation of multiprocessor systems a necessity and has also made multiprocessor systems widely available. While a serial multiprocessor simulation necessarily imposes a linear slowdown, running such a simulation in parallel may help mitigate this effect. In this paper we document our experiences with two different methods of parallelizing Sparc Sulima, a simulator of UltraSPARC IIICu-based multiprocessor systems. In the first approach, a simple interconnect model within the simulator is parallelized non-deterministically using careful locking. In the second, a detailed interconnect model is parallelized while preserving determinism using parallel discrete event simulation (PDES) techniques. While both approaches demonstrate a threefold speedup using 4 threads on workloads from the NAS parallel benchmarks, speedup proved constrained by loadbalancing between simulated processors. A theoretical model is developed to help understand why obs...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: ISPASS
• Authors: Andrew Over, Bill Clarke, Peter E. Strazdins
• Keywords: ISPASS 2007, Multiprocessor Systems, Serial Multiprocessor Simulation, Simulation, Software Engineering