Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Advancing Computer Hardware and Systems' Research Capability, Reproducibility, and Sustainability with the gem5 Simulator Ecosystem

This project aims to improve the cyberinfrastructure ecosystem for computer system research by expanding and improving the popular gem5 simulation infrastructure. The breakdown in Moore’s Law and Dennard Scaling is leading to a drastic increase in the scale of computing systems, making it increasingly difficult to make broad scientific progress in research to improve computer systems without considering the entire scale of the hardware-software stack from transistors to applications.

This project will build on prior NSF investments and scale the gem5 simulator to more users, more types of computing systems, larger and higher fidelity computing systems, and more scientific communities beyond computer architecture. These improvements to the gem5 simulation infrastructure will enable researchers to design and understand the next generation of supercomputers, laptops, and mobile devices.

It also supports education and diversity by creating teaching materials to broaden the participation in computer systems research for both graduate and undergraduate students.

Working with a large and diverse team of experts from the computer architecture community, this project will develop a wide variety of improvements to the gem5 simulation infrastructure. This includes modeling future devices and phenomena such as reliability, security, and chiplets; creating scalable models for modern hardware by improving the accuracy of current models, adding support for emerging vector extensions, and improving support for common accelerators such as GPUs; scaling simulation performance by optimizing gem5’s performance and providing interoperability with other simulation infrastructure; improving modularity, reusability, and reproducibility by making baseline system easier to use and providing ready-to-use benchmarks for many domains; and sustaining the community with outreach and education by running workshops, tutorials, bootcamps and expanding gem5’s userbase beyond computer architects through developing asynchronous learning and teaching tools.

Additionally, it will help ensure the long-term sustainability of the gem5 infrastructure by growing a sustainable ecosystem and increasing participation in computer system research.

This award by the Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure is jointly supported by the Division of Computing and Communications Foundations within the Directorate for Computer and Information Science and Engineering.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.