The Sparc-Sulima Complete UltraSPARC SMP Simulator Project

The Sparc-Sulima Project began as part of the ANU-Fujitsu CAP Program, Phase III. It is continuing under the CC-NUMA Project

Objectives

The objective of this Project is to build an SMP simulator which captures kernel-level and user-level activity, captures thread / process interactions, can produce traces, and can simulate applications from compiled SPARC V9 binaries. The simulator must be robust and constructed so that it is easily extensible, for example to model new versions of a SPARC V9 processor. It is also important that the simulator has acceptable efficiency and any required third party software is under Open Source licences.

Approach

Our approach to these objectives is to use a complete machine simulator, which has the greatest potential accuracy in terms of the interleavings of memory operations in an SMP.

For the purpose of analysing memory operations, cycle-accurate simulation is not essential. Thus only a simple pipeline (one-stage with no instruction grouping) is simulated, as this results in large savings in simplicity and performance.

Currently, the main Sparc-Suilma `core', the UltraSAN UltraSPARC CPU simulator, performs functional emulation by a standard fetch-decode-execute cycle. Various optimizations have been applied to achieve slowdowns of the range 200-400.

We have chosen to base our approach on the Sulima ISA Simulator, initially develop for MIPS64/L4 simulation by Patryk Zadarnowski. This is due to its availability of source codes, and its relatively tractable OO approach.

Documentation and Source Code Availability

Version 0.1 alpha of the source codes are were released in December 2001; most files (gnererally the Sparc-dependent ones) are released under the GPL; files relating to general Sulima infrastructure are under a BSD-style license. Download the (gzipped) tar file from here, and the Sparc-Sulima manual from here (54 pages, 160K).

Version 0.2 alpha was released in September 2002. Download the (gzipped) tar file from here, the required version of SWIG from here, and the Sparc-Sulima manual from here.

Version 0.3 was released in February 2004. Download the (gzipped) tar file from here (992 KBytes), and the Sparc-Sulima manual from here (196 KBytes).

Version 0.4 was released in October 2006. Download the (gzipped) tar file from here 3500 kbyes) , and the Sparc-Sulima manual from here (424 KBytes).

The Sparc-Sulima Research Team and Contact

The current Sparc-Sulima team members are Andrew Over and Peter Strazdins.

Former team members include Bill Clarke, Adam Czezowski and Patrick Fagan.

The team collectively can be contacted at sim-devel[at]ccnuma.anu.edu.au.

Other contributors include:

Markus Watts, from the University of Michigan ITCS Umich Systems Group who has interests in Sparc BSD, who developed code enabling Sparc-Sulima to run on non-SPARC hosts (integrated into the main Sparc-Sulima source tree in late 2003)
Andreas Pfeil, who has worked on checkpointing infrastructure (2003-4)
Mark Thorne, who prototyped a parallel version of the simulator (2004)
Yan Zhang, who performed some preliminary validation work using the NAS Parallel Benchmarks

Publications

Andrew Over, Bill Clarke and Peter Strazdins A Comparison of Two Approaches to Parallel Simulation of Multiprocessors , 2007 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS'07), San Hose, April, 2007.
Peter Strazdins, Bill Clarke and Andrew Over, Efficient Cycle-Accurate Simulation of the UltraSPARC III CPU, CRPITS '07: Proceedings of the Thirtieth Australasian Conference on Computer Science, Ballarat, Australia, January 2007.
Andrew Over, Peter Strazdins and Bill Clarke, Cycle Accurate Memory Modelling: A Case-Study in Validation, in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation (MASCOTS'05), pages 85-94, Atlanta, IEEE, September 2005.
Bill Clarke, Solemn: Solaris emulation mode for Sparc Sulima, (02/04).
Bill Clarke, Adam Czezowski and Peter Strazdins, Implementation Aspects of a Sparc V9 Complete Machine Simulator , (11/01). There is also a talk (01/02).
Peter Strazdins, A Survey of Simulation Tools for CAP Project Phase III , (10/00)
Bill Clarke, SPARC V9 Instruction Set Specification , (10/00)

See also the relevant chapters in the CAP Program Report for 2000 and 2001