Title :
Smart: an advanced shared-memory simulator-towards a system-level simulation environment
Author :
Gabbay, Freddy ; Mendelson, Avi
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. Eng., Technion-Israel Inst. of Technol., Haifa, Israel
Abstract :
System-level events, such as process switching and task migration, have a major effect on the performance of computer systems. “Smart” is a new simulation environment that extends existing simulators, such as MINT, with the capability to emulate the effect of such mechanisms. “Smart” provides a user friendly interface (GUI) that allows control of different system parameters and mechanisms e.g. the type of cache coherency protocols, cache organization, scheduling policies of processes and threads, etc. The Smart environment can be used either for monitoring, analyzing and measuring different system events, or as a powerful visual based debugging tool. This paper describes the “Smart” environment and demonstrates the importance of simulating system-level mechanisms and events in order to understand the overall performance of modern architectures. The Smart simulator presented here was developed to support the simulation of shared memory architectures, and we indicate that similar software environments can be developed to simulate other parallel and distributed architectures as well
Keywords :
digital simulation; performance evaluation; shared memory systems; virtual machines; Smart; Smart environment; cache coherency protocols; cache organization; distributed architectures; performance; scheduling policies; shared memory architectures; shared-memory simulator; system-level simulation environment; user friendly interface; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Computer interfaces; Computer simulation; Control system synthesis; Discrete event simulation; Graphical user interfaces; Processor scheduling; Protocols; Yarn;
Conference_Titel :
Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems, 1997. MASCOTS '97., Proceedings Fifth International Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Haifa
Print_ISBN :
0-8186-7758-9
DOI :
10.1109/MASCOT.1997.567597