FireSim: FPGA-Accelerated Cycle-Exact Scale-Out System Simulation in the Public Cloud

In this article, we present FireSim, an open-source simulation platform that enables fast cycle-exact microarchitectural simulation of large scale-out clusters by combining FPGA-accelerated simulation of silicon-proven RTL designs with scalable, distributed network simulation, running on a public-cl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE MICRO 2019-05, Vol.39 (3), p.56-65
Main Authors: Karandikar, Sagar, Mao, Howard, Kim, Donggyu, Biancolin, David, Amid, Alon, Lee, Dayeol, Pemberton, Nathan, Amaro, Emmanuel, Schmidt, Colin, Chopra, Aditya, Huang, Qijing, Kovacs, Kyle, Nikolic, Borivoje, Katz, Randy Howard, Bachrach, Jonathan, Asanovic, Krste
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Blades
Cloud computing
Computational modeling
Computer networks
Field programmable gate arrays
Microprocessors
Nodes
Rockets
Servers
Simulation
Simulators
Source code
Switches
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Summary:In this article, we present FireSim, an open-source simulation platform that enables fast cycle-exact microarchitectural simulation of large scale-out clusters by combining FPGA-accelerated simulation of silicon-proven RTL designs with scalable, distributed network simulation, running on a public-cloud host platform. By introducing automation and harnessing cloud FPGAs, FireSim provides the usability and productivity of software full-system simulators with the high performance and accuracy of FPGA-accelerated simulation, while adding the unprecedented ability to scale to globally cycle-accurate simulations of thousands of networked nodes. To demonstrate FireSim's scalability, we automatically generate and deploy a target cluster simulation of 1024 3.2-GHz quad-core server nodes, each with 16 GB of DRAM, interconnected by a 200 Gb/s network with low latency, which simulates at a 6.6-MHz processor clock rate (<
ISSN:0272-1732
1937-4143
DOI:10.1109/MM.2019.2910175