[Gems-users] New network simulator for GEM5 and GEMS

["Puente Varona, Valentin" <vpuente@xxxxxxxxx>]

Dear gem5 and gems users,

We are sending this mail to both user lists to announce the public release of the Topaz Network Simulator and its associated interfaces to run jointly with GEMS and GEM5. The simulator will be presented in the next NOCS conference. You can get a copy of the paper at http://goo.gl/Os0j2. The paper includes an extensive performance/accuracy comparison with ruby interconnection network simulators. We want to share with the research community the work developed here during the last years in our group following an open source approach. 

The simulator code is being released under GPL. It is accessible through http://www.atc.unican.es/topaz/. The simulator code and support will be hosted in Google Code (mercurial repos, wikis, code review-boards, issue tracking and support mail-lists). We want to keep it updated with future proposals from our group or other groups and support the users. Needless to say that other developers interested in collaborating with us in the tool will be welcomed! 

With regard to the use jointly with GEMS (although GEMS is dead, there are still some users out there… like ourselves XD), it runs well. Given the model of distribution of GEMS (a.k.a. tar.gz) we have created a mercurial repository that starts with original GEMS 2.1 code and patches it with the required modifications. Your own modified GEMS version could be patched following the guide provided (presumably with some degree of effort).

As for the GEM5 interface, it has been slightly improved to minimize the ruby native code modifications. We have been working with GEM5 developers trying to integrate the interface within the official GEM5 repositories but, we have wisely decided to step back. Topaz is quite a lot more complex than Garnet and it is a bit inconvenient to integrate the whole tool within the GEM5 repositories. The model followed was to provide a clone repository of the latest GEM5 repositories with the interface. If you want to integrate TOPAZ in your own GEM5 copy, a simple pull from our repo will be enough. The number of changes required in GEM5 is quite low, which will merge with your “personal” GEM5 easily. We have tested it with the latest change-sets in the GEM5 repo (dev and stable branches) and it seems to work just fine with the currently available coherence protocols.

So, if you want to have advanced deadlock-free routing, 3D-networks, realistic on-network multicast support, multithreaded network simulation, state-of-the-art router micro architectures, and many other fancy interconnection network features to be used by your CMP… we would be pleased to ease the learning curve;-) 

You can start with Quick-Start guides in http://code.google.com/p/tpzsimul/wiki/GEM5Integration and http://code.google.com/p/tpzsimul/wiki/GEMSIntegration. Let us know if you have any specific issue using http://groups.google.com/group/topaz-discuss or project issues tracking tool.

Take care
 
--Valentin