A program-driven parallel machine simulation environment

Abstract

In recent years, it has been very popular to employ discrete-event simulation as a hardware architecture analytical tool to study distributed-memory multicomputers and shared-memory multiprocessors. After the hardware architecture prototype has been completed, a complete and detailed machine simulation environment can be utilized to evaluate the architecture's efficiency under real operating systems and application software. In this article, we discuss all the development and implementation of a program-executable Transputer network multicomputer as well as 80x86 series multiprocessors, and how they can be operated. On another level, owing to the extreme complexity of the simulated computer systems, parallel discrete-event simulation has also been used to shorten the time of running the simulation. In practice, this simulator can solve problems through a network connection with many workstations. Some of the workstations may be in charge of computing, while others can be responsible for the management of memory, thus making it simpler to establish a parallel machine simulation environment. In addition to providing an environment for programs to execute on it, such a simulator also calculates the time spent in running these programs, so as to evaluate the feasibility for these application programs to run on a hardware system.