Designing Configurable, Modifiable and Reusable Components for Simulation of Multicore Systems

A simulation system for modern multicore architectures is composed of various component models. For such a system to be useful for research purposes, modifiability is a key quality attribute. Users, when building a simulation model, need to have the capability to adjust various aspects of a component, or even replace a component with another of the same type. Software design considerations can determine whether or not a simulation system is successful in providing such capabilities. This paper presents a few design tactics that we adopt in creating configurable, modifiable, and reusable components for Manifold, our parallel simulation framework for multicore systems. The main example component is MCP-cache, a coherence cache model. The ideas behind the tactics are general enough and should be useful to designers of similar systems.