Trace driven simulation for studying MIMD parallel computers

A method is presented for accurately simulating the behavior of parallel machines by using real application codes to model/simulate the behavior of the processing elements. Traces are obtained from the uniprocessor execution of programs to capture the functionality of the programs, and these traces are used to simulate the generation of memory reference by the processors during the simulation of an entire parallel machine. Nonuniformities in memory access patterns in multiprocessor systems are investigated with the help of the trace-driven simulator. It is shown that the accesses made to various memory modules over a short time window can be highly nonuniform even if they are balanced over the entire execution of the program.