CCRI: ENS: Collaborative Research: Modernizing gem5: Expanding the Reach of Computer Architecture Simulation

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Computer systems are increasingly important to society and the advancement of science. In recent years, technological trends have made it increasingly difficult to continue scaling their performance. As a result, research to further improve computer systems is vital. Traditionally, this research has relied on cycle-level software simulation of these computer systems to model the potential improvements of novel techniques. However, much of the software was written 15 years ago, and it is currently maintained by students and researchers. This project will make a concerted effort to improve the underlying simulation infrastructure, which will enable increased research output by the computer systems community. It will specifically focus on the gem5 infrastructure, which is widely used in the community (e.g., cited over 3000 times) and considered the de facto tool for simulating all components of the computing system.This project will enhance and rejuvenate the aging gem5 community infrastructure through improvements to the underlying gem5 components, community outreach and improved user's services, and developing new models for emerging devices required for evaluating important applications (e.g., machine learning, augmented and virtual reality, high performance computing, and system security). These improvements will increase the research output of gem5's broad user base and extend the ability to perform hardware-software co-design to the entire computer systems community. This project will broaden the already vibrant gem5 community through reducing the barrier to entry by (1) running two gem5 summer schools to introduce junior graduate students to gem5 and computer systems research, (2) simplifying gem5's interface, (3) improving the community's documentation and communication channels, and (4) supervising a community code shepherd to help researchers integrate their code with the community infrastructure. The investigators will also create a set of 'known-good' system configurations that will significantly increase the productivity of researchers performing detailed cycle-level research studies. These system configurations will be proxies for current state-of-the-art systems and will be publicly validated against real systems and workloads suggested by the community.This project will create a sustainable path for the future of the gem5 infrastructure by improving the code testing coverage and increasing the robustness of hardware device models. Additionally, community outreach efforts will broaden the community increasing the impact of gem5 and providing more contributors to continue development of this infrastructure after this project completes.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.