Simulation tools to study a distributed shared memory for clusters of symmetric multiprocessors

Distributed shared memory (DSM) systems have become popular as a means of utilizing clusters of computers for solving large applications. We have developed a high-performance DSM, Strings. In addition, to improve the performance of our DSM, a memory hierarchy simulator has been developed that allows us to compare various techniques very quickly and with much less effort. This paper describes our simulator, DSMSim. We show that the simulator's performance closely matches the real system and demonstrate potential performance gains of up to 60% after adding optimization features to the simulator. The simulator also accepts the same code as the software distributed shared memory.