Shared memory as a basis for conservative distributed architectural simulation

Journal ArticleThis paper describes experience in parallelizing an execution-driven architectural simulation system used in the development and evaluation of the Avalanche distributed architecture. It reports on a specific application of conservative distributed simulation on a shared memory platform. Various communication-intensive synchronization algorithms are described and evaluated. Performance results on a bus-based shared memory platform are reported, and extension and scalability of the implementation to larger distributed shared memory configurations are discussed. Also addressed are specific characteristics of architectural simulations that contribute to decisions relating to the conservatism of the approach and to the achievable performance