Abstract
The computing industry is changing rapidly, pushing strongly to consolidation into large “cloud computing” datacenters. New power, availability, and cost constraints require installations that are better optimized for their intended use. The problem of right-sizing large datacenters requires tools that can characterize both the target workloads and the hardware architecture space. Together with the resurgence of variety in industry standard CPUs, driven by very ambitious multi-core roadmaps, this is making the existing modeling techniques obsolete. In this chapter we revisit the basic computer architecture simulation concepts toward enabling fast and reliable datacenter simulation. Speed, full system, and modularity are the fundamental characteristics of a datacenter-level simulator. Dynamically trading off speed/accuracy, running an unmodified software stack, and leveraging existing “component” simulators are some of the key aspects that should drive next generation simulator’s design. As a case study, we introduce the COTSon simulation infrastructure, a scalable full-system simulator developed by HP Labs and AMD, targeting fast and accurate evaluation of current and future computing systems.
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Argollo, E., Falcón, A., Faraboschi, P., Ortega, D. (2010). Toward the Datacenter: Scaling Simulation Up and Out. In: Leupers, R., Temam, O. (eds) Processor and System-on-Chip Simulation. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6175-4_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6175-4_4
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