COTSon: Infrastructure for system-level simulation

BSC-DAC-UPC invite you to attend online the following talk:

Title: COTSon: Infrastructure for system-level simulation
Speakers: Ayose Falcón - Daniel Ortega (HP Labs, Barcelona)
Date: Fri 30, 10:00 (CET)
URL: http://www.ac.upc.edu/video/index,en.html

Abstract

HP Labs' COTSon simulator based on AMD's SimNow is a full system simulation
infrastructure. It allows to simulate complete systems ranging from multicore
nodes up to full clusters of multicore nodes with complete network simulation.
It is composed of a pluggable architecture, in which most features can be
substituted for your own development, thus allowing researchers to use it as
their simulation platform.

There are tons of simulators, why a new one? COTSon is not just another
simulator, it is a simulation infrastructure where you can plugin your own
simulation modules. Our holistic approach simulates the whole system at once,
because we believe that multicore multithreaded architectures of the future can
not be understood without taking into account the whole system, including
devices and the whole operating system. Something similar can be said about
disk and network research.

As a design principle, COTSon trades off accuracy for speed and viceversa,
dynamically allowing the researcher to determine the interesting parts of their
application, as well as doing large space explorations at higher speeds. Why
use many tools if one suffices?

We hope COTSon becomes the de facto standard simulation infrastructure for next
generation systems simulation, and that is why we are making it freely
available under request. If you belong to any kind of research lab or
university and you are interested in microarchitecture simulation, disk
simulation, network simulation or system simulation, COTSon may be perfect for
you.

In this talk, we provide a general description of COTSon and explain the
different research challengues and solutions behind the development of our
simulation infrastructure. More information about COTSon can be found at
http://sites.google.com/site/hplabscotson.

Bio

Ayose Falcón received his BS (1998) and MS (2000) degrees in Computer Science
from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In 2005, he received a PhD
in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) under
the advisory of Prof. Mateo Valero and Dr. Alex Ramirez. His PhD research
included fetch unit optimization, especially branch prediction and instruction
prefetching. During his PhD years, Ayose was a summer intern and then a
consultant at Intel Microprocessor Research Labs, and worked as teach assistant
at UPC for one year. Since 2004, he is a research scientist at HP Labs in
Barcelona. His current research interests include simulation and virtualization
technologies, disciplines in which he has published several papers and
disclosed 6 patents.

Daniel Ortega is a Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs. He joined HP in 2003
after finishing his PhD in Computer Architecture at the Universitat Politècnica
de Catalunya (UPC). His current research interests include simulation and
programming languages. He has previous experience in content processing
systems, dynamic optimization, and computer architecture. He is an active
member of the Computer Architecture community.