Over the last, work has been undertaken at ANU to develop a complete
machine simulator for UltraSPARC SMP architectures. A new project aims
to further develop this simulator and using it in combination with
hardware performance counters to study the performance of a well know
computational chemistry application on NUMA architectures. Its goals
are to consider both how the hardware may be improved to enhance
performance and how the core computational algorithms may be adapted to
better exploit NUMA systems. For example on the software side
addressing questions like how the popular OpenMP programming paradigm
should be extended to account for NUMA.
This talk will give an overview of the CC-NUMA project and its approach
to performance evaluation via simulation. Details on the design,
implementation and performance of the simulator will be given, including
its control and debugging infrastructure, optimizations and its system
call (system trap) emulation mode. Future challenges in simulator
development, including accurate timing modelling of the CPU and cc-NUMA
memory systems, threaded simulator implementation and booting a full
operating system will be outlined.
Further details on the CC-NUMA project are available at
http://ccnuma.anu.edu.au