An overview of Complete Machine Simulation of Shared Memory Computers

Abstract

Machine simulation is widely used in performance evaluation studies, architectural design, and in operating systems and application development. To simulate the operating system or applications that rely on operating system performance, complete machine simulation (as opposed to `user level program' simulation) is required.

This talk gives an overview of complete machine simulation, looking at the complications of simulating the boot process, multiple address contexts, shared memory modelling and interacting processes. As such simulators are used for applications with realistic workloads, performance issues are important; various techniques such as dynamic binary translation to improve performance will also be described. An overview of the state-of-the-art of existing simulator tools will be given.

Such a simulator is being adapted by the ANU-Fujitsu CAP Project, for the purpose of development and debugging of an optimized operating system for large-scale shared memory computers, and to augment shared memory application and architectural evaluations. An overview of the CAP Project and related HPC projects at ANU will also be given.