[HiPEAC-announce] Web seminar "COTSon: Infrastructure for system-level simulation" by Ayose Falcón and Daniel Ortega, Fri 30 10:00 CET

[Enric Morancho]

Dear colleague,

BSC-DAC-UPC invite you to attend online the following talk:

       Title: COTSon: Infrastructure for system-level simulation
    Speakers: Ayose Falcón - Daniel Ortega (HP Labs, Barcelona)
        Date: Fri 30, 10:00 (CET)
         URL: http://www.ac.upc.edu/video/index,en.html

If you would like to ask questions to the speaker, please send an e-mail 
to seminar at hipeac.ac.upc.edu

Best regards,

Enric Morancho

Abstract

HP Labs' COTSon simulator based on AMD's SimNow is a full system 
simulation infrastructure. It allows to simulate complete systems 
ranging from multicore nodes up to full clusters of multicore nodes with 
complete network simulation.
It is composed of a pluggable architecture, in which most features can 
be substituted for your own development, thus allowing researchers to 
use it as their simulation platform.

There are tons of simulators, why a new one? COTSon is not just another 
simulator, it is a simulation infrastructure where you can plugin your 
own simulation modules. Our holistic approach simulates the whole system 
at once, because we believe that multicore multithreaded architectures 
of the future can not be understood without taking into account the 
whole system, including devices and the whole operating system. 
Something similar can be said about disk and network research.

As a design principle, COTSon trades off accuracy for speed and 
viceversa, dynamically allowing the researcher to determine the 
interesting parts of their application, as well as doing large space 
explorations at higher speeds. Why use many tools if one suffices?

We hope COTSon becomes the de facto standard simulation infrastructure 
for next generation systems simulation, and that is why we are making it 
freely available under request. If you belong to any kind of research 
lab or university and you are interested in microarchitecture 
simulation, disk simulation, network simulation or system simulation, 
COTSon may be perfect for you.

In this talk, we provide a general description of COTSon and explain the
different research challengues and solutions behind the development of 
our simulation infrastructure. More information about COTSon can be 
found at http://sites.google.com/site/hplabscotson.

Bio

Ayose Falcón received his BS (1998) and MS (2000) degrees in Computer 
Science from the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. In 2005, he 
received a PhD in Computer Science from the Universitat Politècnica de 
Catalunya (UPC) under the advisory of Prof. Mateo Valero and Dr. Alex 
Ramirez. His PhD research included fetch unit optimization, especially 
branch prediction and instruction prefetching. During his PhD years, 
Ayose was a summer intern and then a consultant at Intel Microprocessor 
Research Labs, and worked as teach assistant at UPC for one year. Since 
2004, he is a research scientist at HP Labs in Barcelona. His current 
research interests include simulation and virtualization technologies, 
disciplines in which he has published several papers and disclosed 6 
patents.

Daniel Ortega is a Senior Research Scientist at HP Labs. He joined HP in 
2003 after finishing his PhD in Computer Architecture at the Universitat 
Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC). His current research interests include 
simulation and programming languages. He has previous experience in 
content processing systems, dynamic optimization, and computer 
architecture. He is an active member of the Computer Architecture community.