FireSim: FPGA-Accelerated Cycle-Exact Scale-Out System Simulation in the Public Cloud

We present FireSim, an open-source simulation platform that enables cycle-exact microarchitectural simulation of large scale-out clusters by combining FPGA-accelerated simulation of silicon-proven RTL designs with a scalable, distributed network simulation. Unlike prior FPGA-accelerated simulation t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings - International Symposium on Computer Architecture pp. 29 - 42
Main Authors: Karandikar, Sagar, Mao, Howard, Kim, Donggyu, Biancolin, David, Amid, Alon, Lee, Dayeol, Pemberton, Nathan, Amaro, Emmanuel, Schmidt, Colin, Chopra, Aditya, Huang, Qijing, Kovacs, Kyle, Nikolic, Borivoje, Katz, Randy, Bachrach, Jonathan, Asanovic, Krste
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.06.2018
Subjects:
Cloud computing
Computational modeling
Computer architecture
Computer networks
Computer simulation
Data centers
Distributed computing
Field programmable gate arrays
Performance analysis
Rockets
Scalability
Servers
Solid modeling
Switches
ISSN:2575-713X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:We present FireSim, an open-source simulation platform that enables cycle-exact microarchitectural simulation of large scale-out clusters by combining FPGA-accelerated simulation of silicon-proven RTL designs with a scalable, distributed network simulation. Unlike prior FPGA-accelerated simulation tools, FireSim runs on Amazon EC2 F1, a public cloud FPGA platform, which greatly improves usability, provides elasticity, and lowers the cost of large-scale FPGA-based experiments. We describe the design and implementation of FireSim and show how it can provide sufficient performance to run modern applications at scale, to enable true hardware-software co-design. As an example, we demonstrate automatically generating and deploying a target cluster of 1,024 3.2 GHz quad-core server nodes, each with 16 GB of DRAM, interconnected by a 200 Gbit/s network with 2 microsecond latency, which simulates at a 3.4 MHz processor clock rate (less than 1,000x slowdown over real-time). In aggregate, this FireSim instantiation simulates 4,096 cores and 16 TB of memory, runs ~14 billion instructions per second, and harnesses 12.8 million dollars worth of FPGAs-at a total cost of only ~100 per simulation hour to the user. We present several examples to show how FireSim can be used to explore various research directions in warehouse-scale machine design, including modeling networks with high-bandwidth and low-latency, integrating arbitrary RTL designs for a variety of commodity and specialized datacenter nodes, and modeling a variety of datacenter organizations, as well as reusing the scale-out FireSim infrastructure to enable fast, massively parallel cycle-exact single-node microarchitectural experimentation.
ISSN:2575-713X
DOI:10.1109/ISCA.2018.00014