34th Annual Simulation Symposium (SS01)
Reference Filtering for Distributed Simulation of Shared Memory Multiprocessors
Seattle, WA
April 22-April 26
ISBN: 0-7695-1092-2
Abstract: This paper proposes a method to reduce the amount of the memory references generated by the front-end of our distributed execution-driven simulator for shared memory multiprocessors named Shaman. The simulator consists of the front-end to execute programs in parallel and the back-end, driven by the memory references from the front-end, to simulate the behavior of the memory system of a target multiprocessor. For high performance simulation, the front-end runs on a PC cluster using software DSM technique and partially simulates the coherent cache of the target system. The key idea of the reference reduction is to use the caches in the front-end as a filter of the references. We prove that the filtering for a memory block is safe if it is accessed in data-race-free manner as the whole. We also show a method to detect racing blocks to inactivate the filtering. The preliminary experiment with SPLASH-2 kernels shows up to 99.6 % of references are filtered out and redundant references are less than 1.4 %.
Citation:
Shigeru Imafuku, Kazuhiko Ohno, Hiroshi Nakashima, "Reference Filtering for Distributed Simulation of Shared Memory Multiprocessors," ss, pp.0219, 34th Annual Simulation Symposium (SS01), 2001