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

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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.