The structural simulation toolkit

TLDR

Supercomputers are increasingly complex, with new scalability, power, reliability, and emerging technologies, yet the HPC community lacks a unified toolset to evaluate and design for these challenges. The authors created the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST), an open, modular, parallel, multi‑criteria, multi‑scale simulation framework, to address this gap. The toolkit implements processor, memory, and network models in a modular, parallel architecture. The SST has been applied to diverse network, memory, and application studies and is positioned to become the standard framework for designing and procuring HPC systems.

Abstract

As supercomputers grow, understanding their behavior and performance has become increasingly challenging. New hurdles in scalability, programmability, power consumption, reliability, cost, and cooling are emerging, along with new technologies such as 3D integration, GP-GPUs, silicon-photonics, and other "game changers". Currently, they HPC community lacks a unified toolset to evaluate these technologies and design for these challenges. To address this problem, a number of institutions have joined together to create the Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST), an open, modular, parallel, multi-criteria, multi-scale simulation framework. The SST includes a number of processor, memory, and network models. The SST has been used in a variety of network, memory, and application studies and aims to become the standard simulation framework for designing and procuring HPC systems.