一种基于超步执行的并行模拟平台研究与实现

Study and Implementation of Big-step Based Parallel Simulation Platform

计算机系统的并行化趋势使得传统的串行模拟器正面临严峻的挑战,一方面由于执行速度和内存的限制无法模拟目标大规模并行系统;另一方面,无法充分利用已有并行系统的资源。因此,串行模拟器已经成为宿主机和目标系统之间的瓶颈。Hypersim是基于SMP集群平台的新型并行模拟器,运行于其上的主从式操作系统原型hyperOS为应用程序提供了运行环境,实验表明,该模拟平台可以正确地模拟一种新型的HPP高性能计算机体系结构。为了高效并行,hypersim中采用细粒度负载分配及高效的同步和通信机制,提出并采用超步执行技术来加速模拟器执行,结果显示hypersim在多进程情况下有一定的加速,在单进程多线程情况下有较好的加速比。

Simulation is facing the great challenge of computing capacity and memory demanding when used for studying extreme large and complex future systems, and sequential simulators have become a bottleneck since they cannot make full use of the abundant CPU and memory resources available on current parallel machines. Hypersim is a novel parallel simulator based on SMP cluster, and a master/client mode prototype operating hyperOS runs on it, results obtained from the experiments show that the simulation platform can simulate a novel HPP supercomputer architecture correctly. The techniques employed to parallelize the simulation was proposed in hypersim, including fine-grind load balance and high efficiency synchronization and communication..A new approach, big-step executing mechanism, was proposed and implemented to accelerate the parallel simulation. Results show that hypersim gets a better performance when running in multi-process mode, and can gain a sound speedup ratio in multi-thread mode.