Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST)
High performance computing architectures are undergoing a marked transformation. Increasing performance of the largest parallel machines at the same exponential rate will require that applications expose more parallelism at an accelerated pace due to the advent of multi-core processors at relatively flat clock rates. The extreme number of hardware components in this machines along with I/O bottlenecks will necessitate looking beyond the traditional checkpoint/restart mechanism for dealing with machine failures. Additionally, as a result of the high power requirements of these machines the energy required to obtain a result will become as important as the time to solution. These changes mean that a new approach to the development of extreme-scale hardware and software is needed relying on the simulaneous exploration of both the hardware and software design space, a process referred to as co-design.
The Structural Simulation Toolkit (SST) enables co-design of extreme-scale architectures by allowing simulation of diverse aspects of hardware and software relevant to such environments. Innovations in instruction set architecture, memory systems, the network interface, and full system network can be explored in the context of design choices for the programming model and algorithms. The package provides two novel capabilities. The first is a fully modular design that enables extensive exploration of an individual system parameter without the need for intrusive changes to the simulator. The second is a parallel simulation environment based on MPI. This provides a high level of performance and the ability to look at large systems. The framework has been successfully used to model concepts ranging from processing in memory to conventional processors connected by conventional network interfaces and running MPI.