NSIM-ACE: An interconnection network simulator for evaluating remote direct memory access

Network simulation is an important technique for designing interconnection networks and communication libraries. Also network simulations are useful for the analysis of internal communication behavior in parallel applications. This paper introduces a new interconnection network simulator NSIM-ACE. This simulator enables us to evaluate RDMA directly while existing simulators do not have such capability. NSIM-ACE also provides a similar user-interface to RDMA-based parallel programs for easy use. The experimental evaluation indicates that the simulation accuracy is sufficient to compare performance of some RDMA-based algorithms and the simulator is capable of predicting performance scalability for non-extinct networks.