The role of Cascade, a cycle-based simulation infrastructure, in designing the Anton special-purpose supercomputers

Cascade is a cycle-based C++ simulation infrastructure used in the design and verification of two successive versions of Anton, a specialized machine designed for high-speed molecular dynamics computation. Cascade was engineered to address the size and speed challenges inherent in simulating massively parallel special-purpose machines. It provides a lightweight programming interface, rich debugging support, tight Verilog integration, fast multithreaded execution, and low memory overhead. Here, we describe the core features of Cascade that proved most valuable for our simulation efforts.