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 efficiency results in networks of thousands of processors. In simulations of large parallel systems, enormous memory needs and long execution times are major difficulties. To minimize these problems, the new method analyzes system performance by using extracted execution step information, e.g. the number of shored 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.<>