Chief: A Simulation Environment for Studying Parallel Systems

Chief is a comprehensive, integrated simulation environment for studying all aspects of parallel system design and performance evaluation including architectures, compilers, algorithms and applications, and simulation techniques. Chief provides this level of functionality through the integration of restructuring / parallelizing compilers, trace generation and collection tools, trace-driven, execution-driven, and critical path simulators, and several parallel simulation methods. Integration makes Chief more flexible, versatile, and adaptable than comparable simulation systems, and allows system evaluation to be performed at a variety of levels of abstraction and with a wide range of cost / accuracy tradeoffs. Chief provides the capability to model serial or parallel systems, to execute simulations on serial or parallel host machines, and to drive these simulations with traces or events derived from serial or parallel program execution. Chief is composed of several major component tools, each of which is portable to a variety of serial and parallel machines.