Resumen de Simulation methodologies for future large-scale parallel systems
Since the early 2000s, computer systems have seen a transition from single-core to multi-core systems. While single-core systems included only one processor core on a chip, current multi-core processors include up to tens of cores on a single chip, a trend which is likely to continue in the future. Today, multi-core processors are ubiquitous. They are used in all classes of computing systems, ranging from low-cost mobile phones to high-end High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. Designing future multi-core systems is a major challenge [12]. The primary design tool used by computer architects in academia and industry is architectural simulation. Simulating a computer system executing a program is typically several orders of magnitude slower than running the program on a real system. Therefore, new techniques are needed to speed up simulation and allow the exploration of large design spaces in a reasonable amount of time.
One way of increasing simulation speed is sampling. Sampling reduces simulation time by simulating only a representative subset of a program in detail. In this thesis, we present a workload analysis of a set of task-based programs. We then use the insights from this study to propose TaskPoint, a sampled simulation methodology for task-based programs. Task-based programming models can reduce the synchronization costs of parallel programs on multi-core systems and are becoming increasingly important. Finally, we present MUSA, a simulation methodology for simulating applications running on thousands of cores on a hybrid, distributed shared-memory system. The simulation time required for simulation with MUSA is comparable to the time needed for native execution of the simulated program on a production HPC system.
The techniques developed in the scope of this thesis permit researchers and engineers working in computer architecture to simulate large workloads, which were infeasible to simulate in the past. Our work enables architectural research in the fields of future large-scale shared-memory and hybrid, distributed shared-memory systems.
