A Novel Many Core Simulator for very Large Clusters running Multiple Applications

Advent of multi-core designs has paved way towards breaking the Exa-scale performance barrier and hence it is been a major focus for modern computer architecture research. It is evident that future generation super computers would have hundreds of multi-core processors at the node level and proportionately a higher number at the cluster level too. Simulation has become a primary technique for evaluating the performance of new design proposals in computer architecture. These node architectures which are generally simulated for its correctness are scaled up to the cluster level. So, there arises a necessity to scale node level simulators to evaluate the metrics of cluster with the help of large scale simulation. Hence, a proactive paradigm shift from the conventional simulation techniques towards effective simulation of cluster level design and addressing its needs becomes inevitable. This research trend accentuates the need for developing a cycle accurate multi-core processor simulator that is scalable to cluster level and therefore we present a scalable simulator that couples a cycle-accurate node simulator with a generic supercomputer network model. At this context, there occurs a necessity towards simulating the node architecture consisting of functional units, network topology, memory hierarchy etc. with cycle accuracy since the Architectural simulators without cycle accuracy which examines the impact of low level system changes on application performance have not historically scaled well [1] [2]. For example these coarse-grained simulators skew dramatically of the order 100x when these changes are scaled up over hundreds of systems at the cluster level.