摘要
Simulation is an important method to evaluate future computer systems. Currently microprocessor architecture has switched to parallel, but almost all simulators remained at sequential stage, and the advantages brought by multi-core or many-core processors cannot be utilized. This paper presents a parallel simulator engine （SimK） towards the prevalent SMP/CMP platform, aiming at large-scale fine-grained computer system simulation. In this paper, highly efficient synchronization, communication and buffer management policies used in SimK are introduced, and a novel lock-free scheduling mechanism that avoids using any atomic instructions is presented. To deal with the load fluctuation at light load case, a cooperated dynamic task migration scheme is proposed. Based on SimK, we have developed large-scale parallel simulators HppSim and HppNetSim, which simulate a full supercomputer system and its interconnection network respectively. Results show that HppSim and HppNetSim both gain sound speedup with multiple processors, and the best normalized speedup reaches 14.95X on a two-way quad-core server.
Simulation is an important method to evaluate future computer systems. Currently microprocessor architecture has switched to parallel, but almost all simulators remained at sequential stage, and the advantages brought by multi-core or many-core processors cannot be utilized. This paper presents a parallel simulator engine （SimK） towards the prevalent SMP/CMP platform, aiming at large-scale fine-grained computer system simulation. In this paper, highly efficient synchronization, communication and buffer management policies used in SimK are introduced, and a novel lock-free scheduling mechanism that avoids using any atomic instructions is presented. To deal with the load fluctuation at light load case, a cooperated dynamic task migration scheme is proposed. Based on SimK, we have developed large-scale parallel simulators HppSim and HppNetSim, which simulate a full supercomputer system and its interconnection network respectively. Results show that HppSim and HppNetSim both gain sound speedup with multiple processors, and the best normalized speedup reaches 14.95X on a two-way quad-core server.
基金
Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60633040
the National High Technology Research and Development 863 Program of China under Grant Nos. 2006AA01A102 and 2007AA01Z115
