SST + Gem5 = a Scalable Simulation Infrastructure for High Performance Computing

Total Page:16

File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb

SST + Gem5 = a Scalable Simulation Infrastructure for High Performance Computing SST + gem5 = A Scalable Simulation Infrastructure for High Performance Computing Mingyu Hsieh Jie Meng Michael Levenhagen Sandia National Labs P.O.Box Boston University Sandia National Labs 5800 ECE Department P.O.Box 5800 Albuquerque, NM Boston, MA Albuquerque, NM [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Kevin Pedretti Ayse Coskun Arun Rodrigues Sandia National Labs Boston University Sandia National Labs P.O.Box 5800 ECE Department P.O.Box 5800 Albuquerque, NM Boston, MA Albuquerque, NM [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] ABSTRACT 1. INTRODUCTION High Performance Computing (HPC) faces new challenges in As HPC continues to push the bounds of computation, it scalability, performance, reliability, and power consumption. faces new challenges in scalability, performance, reliability, Solving these challenges will require radically new hardware and power consumption. To address these challenges, we and software approaches. It is impractical to explore this need to design new architectures, operating systems, pro- vast design space without detailed system-level simulations. gramming models, and software. It is impractical to ex- However, most of the existing simulators are either not suffi- plore this vast design space without detailed system-level ciently detailed, not scalable, or cannot evaluate key system simulations. However, most simulators are either not suffi- characteristics such as energy consumption or reliability. ciently detailed (i.e., glossing over important details in pro- To address this problem, we integrate the highly detailed cessor, memory, or network implementations), not scalable gem5 performance simulator into the parallel Structural Sim- (i.e., simulating highly parallel architectures with serial sim- ulation Toolkit (SST). We add the fast-forwarding capability ulators), or not able to evaluate key system characteristics in the SST/gem5 and port the lightweight Kitten operating such as energy consumption or reliability. system on gem5. In addition, we improve the reliability To address this problem, we have integrated the instruction- model in SST with a comprehensive analysis of system reli- level gem5 simulator into the parallel Structural Simula- ability. Utilizing the simulation framework, we evaluate the tion Toolkit (SST) [17]. We extend the SST/gem5 sim- impact of two energy-efficient resource-conscious scheduling ulator by adding fast-forwarding capabilities, porting the policies on system reliability. Our results show that the HPC-oriented Kitten operating system [12], and adding re- effectiveness of scheduling policies differ according to the liability analysis capabilities. We evaluate the benefits of composition of workload and system topology. the SST/gem5 framework by analyzing scheduling policies. Specifically, this paper makes the following contributions: Categories and Subject Descriptors • We create a new tool for exploring key issues in HPC by combining the capabilities of gem5 (detailed processor and B.6.3 [Logic Design]: Design Aids—Simulation cache models, and full-system simulation ability) and SST (a rich set of HPC-oriented architecture components, scal- General Terms able parallel simulation, and the ability to analyze power and reliability). Performance, Reliability • We add fast-forwarding features in the simulation frame- work, enabling multiple levels of granularity for the same Keywords component in the same simulation. Simulation, Architecture • We integrate the Kitten operating system with gem5. In comparison to Linux system, Kitten’s lightweight kernel 3HUPLVVLRQWRPDNHGLJLWDORUKDUGFRSLHVRIDOORUSDUWRIWKLVZRUNIRU 3HUPLVVLRQWRPDNHGLJLWDORUKDUGFRSLHVRIDOORUSDUWRIWKLVZRUNIRU enables faster simulation and prototyping of system soft- SHUVRQDORUFODVVURRPXVHLVJUDQWHGZLWKRXWIHHSURYLGHGWKDWFRSLHV SHUVRQDORUFODVVURRPXVHLVJUDQWHGZLWKRXWIHHSURYLGHGWKDWFRSLHV ware and run-time management ideas. PermissionDUHQRWPDGHRUGLVWULEXWHGIRUSURILWRUFRPPHUFLDODGYDQWDJH to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this workDQGWKDW for DUHQRWPDGHRUGLVWULEXWHGIRUSURILWRUFRPPHUFLDODGYDQWDJHDQGWKDW • personalFRSLHVEHDUWKLVQRWLFHDQGWKHIXOOFLWDWLRQRQWKHILUVWSDJH or classroom use is granted without fee provided that7RFRS\ copies are We extend the reliability model of SST by implementing FRSLHVEHDUWKLVQRWLFHDQGWKHIXOOFLWDWLRQRQWKHILUVWSDJH7RFRS\ notRWKHUZLVHWRUHSXEOLVKWRSRVWRQVHUYHUVRUWRUHGLVWULEXWHWROLVWV made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies the Monte Carlo method and adding a model for NBTI bearRWKHUZLVHWRUHSXEOLVKWRSRVWRQVHUYHUVRUWRUHGLVWULEXWH this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise,WROLVWV to UHTXLUHVSULRUVSHFLILFSHUPLVVLRQDQGRUDIHH failure mechanism, enabling more comprehensive system republish,UHTXLUHVSULRUVSHFLILFSHUPLVVLRQDQGRUDIHH to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific 6LPXWRROV0DUFK'HVHQ]DQRGHO*DUGD,WDO\ reliability analysis. Utilizing the integrated simulation permission6LPXWRROV0DUFK'HVHQ]DQRGHO*DUGD,WDO\ and/or a fee. &RS\ULJKWk,&67 framework, we evaluate the impact of two resource-consc- SIMUTools&RS\ULJKWk,&67 2012 March 19–23, Desenzano, Italy. '2,LFVWVLPXWRROV ious scheduling policies on system reliability. Copyright'2,LFVWVLPXWRROV 2012 ICST, ISBN . The rest of the paper starts with a discussion of the back- properties and power traces [10]. The SST/gem5 framework ground and related work. Section 3 describes the integration includes both McPAT and HotSpot for power and thermal of SST and gem5. Extensions to the simulation framework modeling. The modular design of SST eases integration of are described in Section 4. Section 5 demonstrates the eval- existing simulators and the interactions among simulators in uation results and is followed by the conclusion. a parallel, scalable, and open-source framework. A distinguishable feature of SST/gem5 is the ability to 2. BACKGROUND evaluate the impact of scheduling policies on system reliabil- ity. Prior research has introduced performance and energy- 2.1 SST aware job scheduling policies that take into account of appli- cation memory characteristics [6, 15]. Merkel et al. [15] em- The Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST) [17] is an open- ploy task activity vectors to characterize applications based source, multi-scale, and parallel architectural simulator that on their resource utilization and schedules applications to aims at the design and evaluation of HPC systems. The core improve system performance and energy efficiency. Fedorova of SST utilizes a component-based event simulation model et al. [6] develop the Power Distributed Intensity (Power DI) built on top of MPI for efficient parallel simulations. The scheduling policy that clusters the computation bound ap- hardware devices, such as processors, are modeled as com- plications on as few machines and as few memory domains as ponents in SST. The component-based modular interface of possible. However, none of these resource-conscious schedul- SST enables the integration of existing simulators (such as ing policies take into consideration of system reliability. In gem5) into a scalable simulation framework. SST has been this work, we use the integrated SST/gem5 framework to validated with two real systems [9]. The SST’s main multi- evaluate two scheduling policies by examining which policy core processor model, genericproc, is derived from the Sim- achieves better system reliability. pleScalar [4]. It couples multiple copies of the sim-out-order pipeline model with a front-end emulation engine execut- ing the PowerPC ISA. Genericproc has a cache coherency 3. INTEGRATION OF SST AND GEM5 model, a prefetcher, and a refactored memory model that In this section, we provide the details of the integration can be connected with more accurate memory models, such of gem5 and SST. The integration requires synchronizing as DRAMSim2 [18]. However, there are limitations such as the clock of gem5 and SST, working around synchronous genericproc has a simple cache coherency protocol and non- messages, and allowing the communication between gem5 configurable memory hierarchy. These limitations drive the and other SST components. We test the integration with need for more detailed processor models in SST. two examples: (1) a Portals 4 [16] offload NIC and router; (2) an external memory model DRAMSim2 [18]. 2.2 gem5 The gem5 simulator [2] is an event-driven performance 3.1 System Emulation Mode Integration simulation framework for computer system architecture re- Figure 1 shows a high level view of how gem5 is encapsu- search. It models major structural simulation components lated as an SST component. On each rank, all gem5 SimOb- (such as CPUs, buses, and caches) as objects, and supports jects live inside an sst::component.Gem5eventqueueis performance simulations in both full-system and syscall-emu- modified so that it is driven by the SST event queue. The lation modes. The full-system mode simulates a complete gem5 is triggered by an SST clock event and the gem5 event computer system including operating system kernel and I/O queue delivers events which are scheduled to arrive at that devices, while syscall-emulation mode simulates statically cycle. Gem5 then stops and returns control back to SST compiled binaries by functionally emulating necessary sys- until the next clock interval. tem calls. The memory subsystem in gem5 models inclu- There are some changes to the initialization. Gem5 tra- sive/exclusive cache hierarchies with various replacement ditionally uses Python to dynamically build the
Recommended publications
  • Gem5, INTEROPERABILITY, and IMPROVING SIMULATOR METHODOLOGY
    gem5, INTEROPERABILITY, AND IMPROVING SIMULATOR METHODOLOGY Jason Lowe-Power [email protected] @jlowepower Outline What is gem5? Recent gem5 features gem5’s future My vision Big news Features coming soon Created at Michigan by students of Steve Reinhardt, principally Nate Binkert. “A tool for simulating systems” 3 4 Created at Michigan by students of Steve Reinhardt, principally Nate Binkert. “A tool for simulating systems” Created at Wisconsin by students of Mark Hill and David Wood. Detailed memory system 5 6 Today today gem5 2011 paper cited over 3000 times 15-20% of ISCA/MICRO/HPCA papers use gem5 Thriving community project Average of 70-ish commits per month About 100 unique contributors over last 2 years 7 Today today Over 400 “models” Over 4000 parameters! 3 timing-based CPU models (simple, in order, out of order) 8 ISAs (ARM, RISC-V, x86, Alpha, Power, SPARC, MIPS, GCN3) 12 memory models (DDR3, DDR4, HBM, HMC, etc.) 42 devices (PCI, Arm platform, x86 platform, storage) AMD GPGPU 12 cache coherence protocols Network on chip (Garnet) 8 Today Programmatic configuration 9 Today Programmatic configuration 10 11 Today today Support for complex ML stacks See https://github.com/KyleRoarty/gem5_docker/ Support for ARM SVE instructions Integration with other simulators DRAMSim2 SST DSENT SystemC McPAT GPGPU-Sim 12 Simulator integration Choose a driver Choose an interface 13 gem5 + SST Multiple implementations SST used as driver for gem5 But two event queues Interface is memory requests Separate setup for each simulator 14 gem5 + SystemC
    [Show full text]
  • Lost in Abstraction: Pitfalls of Analyzing Gpus at the Intermediate Language Level
    2018 IEEE International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture Lost in Abstraction: Pitfalls of Analyzing GPUs at the Intermediate Language Level Anthony Gutierrez, Bradford M. Beckmann, Alexandru Dutu, Joseph Gross, John Kalamatianos, Onur Kayiran, Michael LeBeane, Matthew Poremba, Brandon Potter, Sooraj Puthoor, Matthew D. Sinclair, Mark Wyse, Jieming Yin, Xianwei Zhang, Akshay Jain†, Timothy G. Rogers† AMD Research, Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. †School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Purdue University {anthony.gutierrez, brad.beckmann, alexandru.dutu, joe.gross, john.kalamatianos, onur.kayiran, michael.lebeane, matthew.poremba, brandon.potter, sooraj.puthoor, matthew.sinclair, mark.wyse, jieming.yin, xianwei.zhang}@amd.com {jain156, timrogers}@purdue.edu Abstract—Modern GPU frameworks use a two-phase handful of open-source simulators, such as GPGPU-Sim compilation approach. Kernels written in a high-level [11], gem5 [14], and Multi2Sim [35]. language are initially compiled to an implementation- Simulating a GPU is especially challenging because of agnostic intermediate language (IL), then finalized to the two-phase compilation flow typically used to generate the machine ISA only when the target GPU hardware GPU kernel binaries. To maintain portability between dif- is known. Most GPU microarchitecture simulators ferent generations of GPU hardware, GPU kernels are first available to academics execute IL instructions because compiled to an intermediate language (IL). Prior to launch- there is substantially less functional state associated ing a kernel, low-level software, such as the GPU driver or with the instructions, and in some situations, the ma- runtime, finalizes the IL into the machine instruction set chine ISA’s intellectual property may not be publicly architecture (ISA) representation that targets the GPU disclosed.
    [Show full text]
  • THE AMD Gem5 APU SIMULATOR: MODELING GPUS USING the MACHINE ISA
    THE AMD gem5 APU SIMULATOR: MODELING GPUS USING THE MACHINE ISA TONY GUTIERREZ, SOORAJ PUTHOOR, TUAN TA*, MATT SINCLAIR, AND BRAD BECKMANN AMD RESEARCH, *CORNELL JUNE 2, 2018 OBJECTIVES AND SCOPE Objectives ‒ Introduce the Radeon Open Compute Platform (ROCm) ‒ AMD’s Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture and GCN3 ISA ‒ Describe the gem5-based APU simulator Modeling Scope APU ‒ Emphasis on the GPU side of the simulator systems ‒ APU (CPU+GPU) model, not discrete GPU ‒ Covers GPU arch, GCN3 ISA, and HW-SW interfaces Why are we releasing our code? ‒ Encourage AMD-relevant research ‒ Modeling ISA and real system stack is important [1] ‒ Enhance academic collaborations ‒ Enable intern candidates to get experience before arriving ‒ Enable interns to take their experience back to school Acknowledgement ‒ AMD Research’s gem5 team [1] Gutierrez et al. Lost in Abstraction: Pitfalls of Analyzing GPUs at the Intermediate Language Level. HPCA, 2018. 2 | THE AMD gem5 APU SIMULATOR | JUNE 2, 2018 | ISCA 2018 TUTORIAL | QUICK SURVEY Who is in our audience? ‒ Graduate students ‒ Faculty members ‒ Working for government research labs ‒ Working for industry Have you written an GPU program? ‒ CUDA, OpenCLTM, HIP, HC, C++ AMP, other languages Have you used these simulators? ‒ GPGPU-Sim ‒ Multi2Sim ‒ gem5 ‒ Our HSAIL-based APU model Are you familiar with our HPCA 2018 paper? ‒ Lost in Abstraction: Pitfalls of Analyzing GPUs at the Intermediate Language Level 3 | THE AMD gem5 APU SIMULATOR | JUNE 2, 2018 | ISCA 2018 TUTORIAL | OUTLINE Topic Presenter Time Background Tony 8:00 – 8:15 ROCm, GCN3 ISA, and GPU Arch Tony 8:15 – 9:15 HSA Implementation in gem5 Sooraj 9:15 – 10:00 Break 10:00 – 10:30 Ruby and GPU Protocol Tester Tuan 10:30 – 11:15 Demo and Workloads Matt 11:15 – 11:50 Summary and Questions All 11:50 – 12:00 4 | THE AMD gem5 APU SIMULATOR | JUNE 2, 2018 | ISCA 2018 TUTORIAL | BACKGROUND Overview of gem5 ‒ Source tree GPU terminology and system overview HSA standard and building blocks ‒ Coherent shared virtual memory ‒ User-level queues ‒ Signals ‒ etc.
    [Show full text]
  • Enhancing the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture
    Enhancing the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture Plamen Petrov MInf Project (Part 1) Report Master of Informatics School of Informatics University of Edinburgh 2019 3 Abstract Since its emergence, RISC-V has offered a license-free alternative to proprietary in- struction sets designed by ARM and Intel by providing a stable base to researchers and small companies. This makes it possible for small companies and researchers to design new cores without incurring exorbitant costs. In our two-part project we explore RISC- V’s performance compared to the commercial ARM and X86 architectures. Most of the first part focuses on static code size, where we find that RISC-V performs very rea- sonably, but is behind Thumb2. For this reason, we propose improvements to RISC-V which constitute of new prologue and epilogue instructions that almost fully bridge this gap. We give ideas for other possible enhancements and plan to extend the project to cover dynamic measures in the second part. Overall, we conclude that RISC-V per- forms very well given the resources invested in it and open instruction sets, in general, deserve to be developed further for the better of the computer architecture field as a whole. 4 Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to my supervisor Professor Nigel Topham for supporting me with the project throughout the year. Table of Contents 1 Introduction 7 1.1 Overview . 7 1.2 Aims . 9 1.3 Contributions . 10 1.4 Outline . 10 2 Background 11 2.1 Abbreviations . 11 2.2 Binary File . 11 2.3 SPEC2006 .
    [Show full text]
  • Latest Status of These Tests on Gem5
    gem5art Release 0.2.1 Jul 01, 2021 Contents 1 Introduction 3 1.1 Installing gem5art............................................4 2 Artifacts 5 2.1 gem5art artifacts.............................................5 2.2 ArtifactDB................................................7 2.3 Artifacts API Documentation......................................9 3 Run 15 3.1 Introduction............................................... 15 3.2 SE and FS mode runs.......................................... 15 3.3 Running an experiment.......................................... 16 3.4 Run Already in the Database....................................... 17 3.5 Searching the Database to find Runs................................... 17 3.6 Searching the Database to find Runs with Specific Names....................... 18 3.7 Runs API Documentation........................................ 18 4 Tasks 21 4.1 Use of Python Multiprocessing..................................... 21 4.2 Use of Celery............................................... 21 4.3 Tasks API Documentation........................................ 22 5 Disk Images 23 5.1 Introduction............................................... 23 5.2 Building a Simple Disk Image with Packer............................... 23 6 Frequently Asked Questions 27 7 Tutorial: Run Full System Linux Boot Tests 29 7.1 Introduction............................................... 29 7.2 Setting up the environment........................................ 30 7.3 Building gem5.............................................. 30 7.4 Creating a disk
    [Show full text]
  • Sources of Error in Full-System Simulation
    Sources of Error in Full-System Simulation Anthony Gutierrez Joseph Pusdesris Chander Sudanthi Christopher D. Emmons Ronald G. Dreslinski Trevor Mudge Mitchell Hayenga Nigel Paver Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory ARM Research - Austin, TX University of Michigan - Ann Arbor, MI fchander.sudanthi, chris.emmons, mitch.hayenga, [email protected] fatgutier, joemp, rdreslin, [email protected] Abstract—In this work we investigate the sources of error corrected. Specification and abstraction errors, however, may in gem5—a state-of-the-art computer simulator—by validating remain in the simulator for several reasons—certain features it against a real hardware platform: the ARM Versatile Express of a system may not be publicly available, or the abstractions TC2 development board. We design a custom gem5 configuration may simplify the simulator code and improve simulation and make several changes to the simulator itself in order to speed. These abstractions may not impact the accuracy of the more closely match the Versatile Express TC2 board. With simulator significantly for its intended usage scenario, however the modifications we make to the simulator, we are able to achieve a mean percentage runtime error of 5% and a mean they may cause experimental error that is unacceptable when absolute percentage runtime error of 13% for the SPEC CPU2006 the simulator is modified to represent a system it was not benchmarks. For the PARSEC benchmarks we achieve a mean originally intended to model. Therefore, it is necessary to percentage runtime error of -11% and -12% for single and dual- validate the simulator to ensure that these errors do not lead core runs respectively, and a mean absolute percentage runtime to unreliable results.
    [Show full text]
  • Empirical CPU Power Modelling and Estimation in the Gem5 Simulator
    Empirical CPU Power Modelling and Estimation in the gem5 Simulator Basireddy Karunakar Reddy∗, Matthew J. Walker∗, Domenico Balsamo∗, Stephan Diestelhorsty, Bashir M. Al-Hashimi∗ and Geoff V. Merrett∗ ∗University of Southampton yARM Ltd. Southampton, UK Cambridge, UK fkrb1g15,mw9g09,db2a12,bmah,[email protected] [email protected] Abstract—Power modelling is important for modern CPUs The bottom-up power models take a CPU specification (e.g. to inform power management approaches and allow design cache size, number of pipelines) and attempt to estimate the space exploration. Power simulators, combined with a full-system power by first estimating the CPU complexity, number of architectural simulator such as gem5, enable power-performance trade-offs to be investigated early in the design of a system components and area and then the amount of switching activity with different configurations (e.g number of cores, cache size, required to perform different tasks. Wattch is a framework for etc.). However, the accuracy of existing power simulators, such architectural-level power simulation. CACTI is a modelling as McPAT, is known to be low due to the abstraction and tool for estimating cache and memory access time, cycle specification errors, and this can lead to incorrect research time, area, leakage, and dynamic power using device models conclusions. In this paper, we present an accurate power model, built from measured data, integrated into gem5 for estimating based on the industry-standard ITRS roadmap. McPAT is an the power consumption of a simulated quad-core ARM Cortex- integrated power, area, and timing modelling framework. In A15. A power modelling methodology based on Performance particular, McPAT has gained popularity due to its ease-of-use Monitoring Counters (PMCs) is used to build and evaluate the and readiness, as it needs a single configuration file with activ- integrated model in gem5.
    [Show full text]
  • Appendices a Sample Gem5 Python Configuration Code
    Table of Contents I Table of Contents List of Figures III List of Acronyms IV 1 Introduction and background 1 1.1 Real-time systems . ............... 1 1.2 Verification of the real-time systems . 1 1.3 The worst case execution time of a software program . 3 1.3.1 Static analysis . ............. 3 1.3.2 Measurement . ............. 4 1.4 Hardware model in analysis tools . 4 1.5 Moving toward heterogeneous systems . 6 2 Thesis goals and contributions 7 2.1 Goals of the thesis . ................ 7 2.2 Structure of the thesis . .............. 7 3 Related work 8 3.1 Hardware models . ............... 8 3.2 Simulators . ................... 8 4 Gem5 input hardware model 10 5 New hardware description model 13 5.1 Model specification . 13 5.1.1 Processor . 13 5.1.2 Cache . 14 5.1.3 Memory . 15 5.1.4 Link . ................... 16 5.1.5 Group . 16 5.2 Model JSON format . 16 5.3 Model example . 18 6 Application overview 21 6.1 Application functionalities . 21 6.2 How application works . 22 © Uppsala University Duc Anh Nguyen Table of Contents II 6.3 Gem5 simulation and measuring WCET . 25 6.3.1 Gem5 Python configurationfile.................... 25 6.3.2 Translating model to arguments and simulating . 26 6.3.3 Extracting output statistics . 28 7 Conclusion and future work 30 7.1 Future work . 30 7.1.1 The hardware desciption model . 30 7.1.2 The application . 30 References 32 Appendices 35 A Sample Gem5 Python configuration code 35 © Uppsala University Duc Anh Nguyen List of Figures III List of Figures Figure 1.1: Overview of an analysis tool .
    [Show full text]
  • Validation of the Gem5 Simulator for X86 Architectures
    Validation of the gem5 Simulator for x86 Architectures Ayaz Akram1 Lina Sawalha2 University of California, Western Michigan University, Davis, CA Kalamazoo, MI [email protected] [email protected] Abstract—gem5 has been extensively used in computer archi- heterogeneous systems composed of many cores and complex tecture simulations and in the evaluation of new architectures configurations. gem5 has been used by ARM research to for HPC (high performance computing) systems. Previous work perform HPC platform simulation and by AMD for their has validated gem5 against ARM platforms. However, gem5 still shows high inaccuracy when modeling x86 based processors. Exascale project [4]. In this work, we focus on the simulation of a single node gem5 [3] supports several ISAs (instruction set architec- high performance system and study the sources of inaccuracies tures) like x86, ARM, Alpha, MIPS, RISC-V and SPARC. It of gem5. Then we validate gem5 simulator against an Intel supports simple and quick functional simulation and detailed processor, Core-i7 (Haswell microarchitecture). We configured simulation modes. The detailed simulation can be either with gem5 as close as possible to match Core-i7 Haswell microar- chitecture configurations and made changes to the simulator to system call emulation or with full-system support, in which add some features, modified existing code, and tuned built-in gem5 is capable of booting a Linux operating system. gem5 configurations. As a result, we validated the simulator by fixing supports two different pipeline implementations, in-order (IO) many sources of errors to match real hardware results with and out-of-order (OoO). gem5 has been previously validated less than 6% mean error rate for different control, memory, for ARM based targets [5], [6].
    [Show full text]
  • The Gem5 Simulator: Version 20.0+∗ a New Era for the Open-Source Computer Architecture Simulator
    The gem5 Simulator: Version 20.0+∗ A new era for the open-source computer architecture simulator Jason Lowe-Power, Abdul Mutaal Ahmad, Ayaz Akram, Mohammad Alian, Rico Amslinger, Matteo Andreozzi, Adrià Armejach, Nils Asmussen, Brad Beckmann, Srikant Bharadwaj, Gabe Black, Gedare Bloom, Bobby R. Bruce, Daniel Rodrigues Carvalho, Jeronimo Castrillon, Lizhong Chen, Nicolas Derumigny, Stephan Diestelhorst, Wendy Elsasser, Carlos Escuin, Marjan Fariborz, Amin Farmahini-Farahani, Pouya Fotouhi, Ryan Gambord, Jayneel Gandhi, Dibakar Gope, Thomas Grass, Anthony Gutierrez, Bagus Hanindhito, Andreas Hansson, Swapnil Haria, Austin Harris, Timothy Hayes, Adrian Herrera, Matthew Horsnell, Syed Ali Raza Jafri, Radhika Jagtap, Hanhwi Jang, Reiley Jeyapaul, Timothy M. Jones, Matthias Jung, Subash Kannoth, Hamidreza Khaleghzadeh, Yuetsu Kodama, Tushar Krishna, Tommaso Marinelli, Christian Menard, Andrea Mondelli, Miquel Moreto, Tiago Mück, Omar Naji, Krishnendra Nathella, Hoa Nguyen, Nikos Nikoleris, Lena E. Olson, Marc Orr, Binh Pham, Pablo Prieto, Trivikram Reddy, Alec Roelke, Mahyar Samani, Andreas Sandberg, Javier Setoain, Boris Shingarov, Matthew D. Sinclair, Tuan Ta, Rahul Thakur, Giacomo Travaglini, Michael Upton, Nilay Vaish, Ilias Vougioukas, William Wang, Zhengrong Wang, Norbert Wehn, Christian Weis, David A. Wood, Hongil Yoon, Éder F. Zulian † ABSTRACT and every year many papers published in the top computer archi- The open-source and community-supported gem5 simulator is one tecture venues use gem5 as their main evaluation infrastructure. of the most popular tools for computer architecture research. This Additionally, gem5 is one of the tools used to design the Fugaku simulation infrastructure allows researchers to model modern com- supercomputer, one of the first exascale systems [45]. puter hardware at the cycle level, and it has enough fidelity to boot The gem5 simulator [18] is an open source community-supported unmodified Linux-based operating systems and run full applica- computer architecture simulator system.
    [Show full text]
  • Evaluating Gem5 and QEMU Virtual Platforms for ARM Multicore Architectures
    DEGREE PROJECT IN COMPUTER SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING, SECOND CYCLE, 30 CREDITS STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN 2016 Evaluating Gem5 and QEMU Virtual Platforms for ARM Multicore Architectures JOSÉ LUIS BISMARCK FUENTES MORALES KTH ROYAL INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY SCHOOL OF INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY Evaluating Gem5 and QEMU Virtual Platforms for ARM Multicore Architectures José Luis Bismarck Fuentes Morales 2016-09-25 Master’s Thesis Examiner Ingo Sander Academic adviser Johnny Öberg KTH Royal Institute of Technology School of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Department of Communication Systems SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden Abstract | iii Abstract Accurate virtual platforms allow for crucial, early, and inexpensive assessments about the viability and hardware constraints of software/hardware applications. The growth of multicore architectures in both number of cores and relevance in the industry, in turn, demands the emergence of faster and more efficient virtual platforms to make the benefits of single core simulation and emulation available to their multicore successors whilst maintaining accuracy, development costs, time, and efficiency at acceptable levels. The goal of this thesis is to find optimal virtual platforms to perform hardware design space exploration for multi-core architectures running filtering functions, particularly, a discrete signal filtering Matlab algorithm used for oil surveying applications running on an ARM Cortex-A53 quadcore CPU. In addition to the filtering algorithm, the PARSEC benchmark suite was also used to test platform compliance under workloads with diverse characteristics. Upon reviewing multiple virtual platforms, the gem5 simulator and the QEMU emulator were chosen to be tested due to their ubiquitousness, prominence and flexibility. A Raspberry Pi Model B was used as reference to measure how closely these tools can model a commonly used embedded platform.
    [Show full text]
  • Accelerates In-Memory Databases with Near Data Computing Kevin Hsieh Amirali Boroumand [email protected] [email protected]
    Accelerates In-Memory Databases with Near Data Computing Kevin Hsieh Amirali Boroumand [email protected] [email protected] 1. Problem and Motivation functions to parallelize them and hide the memory latency. Doing these operations on the memory side can minimize Modern databases, such as H-Store[14], VoltDB[23], and the data movements over wires, which costs 23X energy of Masstree[20], have been moving from disk to main memory double-precision fused-multiply add operation in 10nm[15]. because cheaper commodity DRAMs are orders of magnitude Processing bulk data on the memory side can also significantly faster. Furthermore, DRAM-based key-value storage servers, reduce cache thrashing on the processor side. such as memcached[9] and Redis[22], have been known as critical parts of major Internet services. 3. Related Works All the paradigm shifts from disks to DRAMs have made the bandwidth and latency of DRAMs, or memory wall[26], Several prior studies analyzed the bottlenecks of databases and become the emerging bottleneck of data centers. Conventional proposed specialized accelerators to speed them up. The most databases are known to spend at least 50% of their execution common benchmarks are TPC-C for online transaction pro- time on memory stalls[3]. This problem is getting worse for cessing (OLTP) and TPC-H for online analytical processing in-memory databases. For example, the profiling of Masstree (OLAP)[2]. Most OLAP related works used MonetDB[12], showed that the get operations spend 66%-75% of time on an in-memory, column-store database. On the other hand, the DRAM stalls[20].
    [Show full text]