EC/DSIM: A Frontend and Simulator for Huge Parallel Systems

This paper presents a new fast way to simulate large networks of computers. The method uses a frontend EC, which accepts a parallel C program and translates it into a program in an intermediate language for parallel system simulations. An event driven simulator for distributed shared memory systems, DSIM, uses the intermediate language to simulate and obtain ee-ciency results in networks of thousands of processors. In simulations of large parallel systems, enormous memory needs and long execution times are major dif-culties. To minimize these problems, the new method analyzes system performance by using extracted execution step information, e.g. the number of shared writes in a code segment, to predict task completion times rather than executing the program step by step. Workstation evaluations of parallel codes running on several thousand processors are feasible using EC/DSIM.