High-Performance Retargetable Simulator for Parallel Architectures

摘要

In this thesis, we describe Proteus, a high-performance simulation-based systemfor the evaluation of parallel algorithms and system software. Proteus is built around a retargetable parallel architecture simulator and a flexible data collection and display component. The simulator uses a combination of simulation and direct execution to achieve high performance, while retaining simulation accuracy. Proteus can be configured to simulate a wide range of shared memory and message passing MIMD architectures and the level of simulation detail can be chosen by the user. Detailed memory, cache and network simulation is supported. Parallel programs can be written using a programming model based on C and a set of runtime system calls for thread and memory management. The system allows nonintrusive monitoring of arbitrary information about an execution, and provides flexible graphical utilities for displaying recorded data. To validate the accuracy of the system, a number of published experiments were reproduced on Proteus. In all cases the results obtained by simulation are very close to those published, a fact that provides support for the reliability of the system. Performance measurements demonstrate that the simulator is one to two orders of magnitude faster than other similar multiprocessor simulators.