Distributed Web-based Platform for Computer Architecture Simulation

Computer architecture simulation and modeling require a huge amount of time and resources, not only for the simulation itself but also regarding the configuration and submission procedures. A quite common simulation toolset (SimpleScalar) has been used to model a variety of platforms ranging from simple unpipelined processors to detailed dynamically scheduled microarchitectures with multiple-level memory hierarchies. In this paper we propose a platform for automatically executing a massive number of simulations in parallel, by exploiting a distributed computing approach. We developed a Web-based simulation system consisting in a front-end user interface and a back-end part supported on a grid system. The front-end is responsible for configuring the simulation and parsing the results, while the back-end distributes the workload by using Condor scheduler. Experimental results show that it is very easy to use the system, even when dealing with a huge number of simulations, and also it provides results in a very suitable format. Moreover, it has been concluded that a significant speedup can be achieved, by exploiting parallelism at the benchmark levels or also by sampling each benchmark with the SimPoint tool.