SimAPI—A common programming interface for simulation

This paper describes SimAPI, a common programming interface for cycle simulators, and how SimAPI was used to test the S/390® Parallel Enterprise Server Generation 4. SimAPI provides a rich set of functions useful for programs and test cases to drive and monitor a simulation model. Support exists for multithreading, event detection, checkpoint/restart, and accessing objects in the model. Most of the code which implements this interface is shared among all simulators, with only a small amount of simulator-specific code needed to connect a simulator to SimAPI. This makes it easy to run a new simulator with SimAPI.