MICA: a memory and interconnect simulation environment for cache-based architectures

MICA is a new-generation simulation environment, which provides complete simulation facilities for simulating distributed shared memory (DSM) multiprocessors. It runs on the inexpensive Linux-based PCs. MICA uses application traces as inputs and provides a core scheduler and memory, and interconnect interfaces. A rich set of synchronization algorithms and architecture simulator are also provided. We introduce the MICA simulator environment and demonstrate its use in investigating the effectiveness of one-to-many (multicast) communication for write invalidation in DSM multiprocessors.