The next talk in the STEP Lecture Series will be given by Dr. Derek Chiou on Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 5:00pm PST. The talk has been organized in collaboration with various universities in Pakistan and will be streamed live. A brief Q&A session will follow the talk. Undergraduate and graduate students with non-engineering backgrounds are also encouraged to attend.
Title: Fast and Accurate Simulation of Computer Systems
Where:
Air University
AKU-IED
BZU Multan
FAST-NU Islamabad
IMS Peshawar
LUMS
NUST SEECS
UET Taxilla
University of Sargodha
SZABIST
When: March 25, 2010, at 5:10-6:25pm Pakistan Standard Time (7:10-8:25am CDT)
Abstract:
Simulators of computers are essential starting from the architectural phase, through implementation and verification, and even during software development and tuning. However, building computer simulators that are both fast and accurate has traditionally been a challenging problem that has recently been further aggravated by the proliferation of multicore processors. In this talk, I will describe the FPGA-Accelerated Simulation Technologies (FAST) methodology for building fast, parallelized, full-system, cycle-accurate-capable simulators of multicore target systems. Our current implementation of a FAST simulator runs on a multicore+FPGA platform and simulates a multicore x86 system running unmodified Linux. Simulation speeds are roughly 10MIPS range in cycle-accurate mode and significantly faster at lower accuracy. The simulator is currently being augmented with power estimation and reliability modeling capabilities at the same simulation speeds.
Bio:
Derek Chiou is an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Austin. His research areas are high performance computer simulation, computer architecture, parallel computing, Internet router architecture and network processors. Before UT, Dr. Chiou was a system architect for five years at Avici Systems, a manufacturer of terabit core routers. Dr. Chiou received his Ph.D., S.M. and S.B. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT. His research is supported by a DOE Career award, an NSF CAREER award, NSF and SRC awards as well as donations from Intel, IBM, Xilinx, Freescale, Altera, and VMWare.
Acknowledgments: STEP is very grateful to Dr. Shahab Baqai at LUMS for his continued support and help in organizing the lecture series. Special thanks to Higher Education Commission of Pakistan (HEC) for facilitating the video broadcast of this talk.
[...] Other speakers included Prof. Derek Chiou of University of Texas at Austin who spoke on the challenges in simulating computer systems; Prof. Adrien Treuille of CMU who talked about modeling and controlling complex dynamics; Dr. [...]