language: en

[Reprinted from International Journal in Computer Simulation, Vol. 1, pp. 31-58 (1991)]

The Efficient Simulation of Parallel Computer Systems

R. G. Covington
Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
125-233 4800 Oak Grove Drive Pasadena, CA 91109
S. Dwarkadas, J. R. Jump, and J. B. Sinclair
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Rice University
Houston, Texas 77251
S. Madala
Coherent Systems, Inc.
1000 Bay Area Blvd., Suite 206 Houston, TX 77058

Abstract: An ongoing research project involves the design and evaluation of a software system for simulating parallel computers. A major goal in the development of this system was to avoid the high overhead associated with the conventional instruction-level simulation of sequential computers, but to retain the accuracy of that technique derived from its use of the execution of real programs. The resulting system is program-driven, but the overhead is significantly reduced by profiling the program to get timing estimates for its basic blocks, which are then used at run time to generate process execution times dynamically while avoiding a detailed emulation of each instruction's execution. A number of experiments dealing with message-passing computer systems have been performed in order to determine the level of accuracy that can be expected from its performance predictions and to measure its overhead.

Index Terms - Architecture models, efficiency, parallel computers, parallel programs, performance, simulation, testbed, validation.

[This research was supported by Texas Instruments Grant No. TI720845RJ, NSF/ONR Grant No. N00014-87-K 0324, SDSU/SDIO Contract No. N66001-85-D-0203, NASA Grant No. NAG 0-208, and a Shell Doctoral Fellowship.]