Fast and Portable Parallel Architecture Simulators: Wisconsin Wind Tunnel II

Abstract

Analysis of future parallel computers requires rapid simulation of target designs running realistic workloads. These simulations have been accelerated by two techniques: direct execution and the use of a parallel host. Historically, these techniques have been considered to lack portability. We identify four key operations necessary to make these simulations portable. This allows us to run the Wisconsin Wind Tunnel II (WWT II) readily on a wide range of SPARC platforms from a workstation cluster to a symmetric multiprocessor (SMP). WWT II has good performance and scalability as shown on a range of benchmarks. WWT II achieves speedups between 8.6 and 13.6 on a 16 host processor SMP. Finally, we show that parallel simulation with WWT II is cost-effective.