CI-P: Planning Simulation Infrastructure Evaluation for Parallel/Distributed Computer Systems

在由许多连接的计算机（如数据中心和超级计算机）组成的计算机系统上以并行/分布式方式运行一个或多个应用程序的重要性不断增加，因为有价值和必要的应用程序的扩散，包括b谷歌、Facebook、Amazon等提供的各种基于internet的服务。考虑到这些应用对社会、经济和环境的巨大影响，对运行此类应用的并行/分布式计算机系统的性能和功率效率进行评估是至关重要的。这需要一个灵活的、详细的、开源的全系统仿真基础设施，而这是目前所缺乏的。该项目的目标是为开发这样一个评估基础设施奠定基础，以提高计算性能，从而确保美国学术界和工业界在大规模并行/分布式计算方面的领先地位。这项规划赠款将使开发一个系统模拟器能够增强基本功能和模型，以支持简单并行/分布式计算机系统的模拟。它将被分发到计算机体系结构和操作系统研究社区，期望这样的模拟器将为开发更先进的全系统仿真基础设施奠定基础，以便在未来能够快速而精确地模拟更具代表性的并行/分布式计算机系统。将安排一个教程来促进系统模拟器的使用，并组织一个讲习班，由学生、学术机构和领先的工业/国家研究实验室的研究人员参加，以确定一个完整的系统模拟基础设施所需的各种要求和理想特征。

The importance of running one or more applications on a computer system comprised of many connected computers such as data centers and supercomputers in a parallel/distributed manner has continued to increase because of the proliferation of valuable and essential applications including various Internet-based services provided by Google, Facebook, Amazon etc. The evaluation of performance and power efficiency of parallel/distributed computer systems running such applications prove to be critical when the high impact of these applications on our society, economy and environment is considered. This necessitates a flexible, detailed, and open-source full-system simulation infrastructure, which is lacking at present. The goal of this project is to lay the groundwork for developing such an evaluation infrastructure for increased computing performance, so as to assure the leading position of the US academia and industry in large-scale parallel/distributed computing.This planning grant will enable developing a system simulator augmented with rudimentary features and models to support simulation of a simple parallel/distributed computer system. It will be distributed to the computer architecture and operating system research communities with the expectation that such a simulator will lay the foundation for developing a more advanced full-system simulation infrastructure that can quickly but precisely simulate more representative parallel/distributed computer system in the future. A tutorial will be arranged to foster the use of the system simulator, and a workshop, which will involve students, researchers from academic institutions and leading industrial/national research labs, will be organized to identify various requirements and desirable features needed by a full blown system simulation infrastructure.