Current challenges in simulations of HPC systems

Abstract

Simulation of many-core HPC systems is nowadays an active and fruitful area of research. Recent and future proposals are driven by the need of a fast, efficient, and comprehensive simulation framework. This simulation framework should be complete in several ways. First, it should model a wide range of components and provide the mechanisms necessary to plug-in more components as needed. Second, it should allow the designer to focus on critical components while avoiding a large part of the simulation complexity. Each of these components should be able to be evaluated with multiple models with distinct detail levels, ranging from simply analytical models to detailed cycle-accurate simulations. Third, a complete simulation framework should provide a wide range of metrics of interest for the designer and the market. Finally, support for heterogeneous architectures combining CPU and GPU, as well as some degree of reconfigurability is surely required. Building such titanic framework is and will be a collaborative process between researchers around the globe and it is expected to be a hot research topic for the next years.