SimNUMA: Simulating NUMA-Architecture Multiprocessor Systems Efficiently

Non-uniform memory access (NUMA) architecture is widely used in high-end servers and computing systems due to its scalability. In recent years, the number of processor cores in NUMA systems increases rapidly with the development of multi-core processors. Along with the growing of system scales, simulation of NUMA systems becomes a challenge to traditional general-purpose simulators by reason of their low simulation performance. This paper presents SimNUMA, an execution-driven full-system simulator dedicated for NUMA systems. In the design of SimNUMA, to improve simulation performance significantly, the same type of processor with the target machine is used in the host system, and a new method to capture remote-memory accesses efficiently is proposed, in addition, parallel simulation is used to achieve scalability and improve performance. The modeling and simulation of interconnection networks are also supported. The simulator is tested in accuracy, scalability and performance, results show that the simulation slowdown is rather satisfying. Finally, the paper gives simulation experiments for different scales of target NUMA systems.