Switchboard: An Open-Source Framework for Modular Simulation of Large Hardware Systems
<|reference_start|>Switchboard: An Open-Source Framework for Modular Simulation of Large Hardware Systems: Scaling up hardware systems has become an important tactic for improving performance as Moore's law fades. Unfortunately, simulations of large hardware systems are often a design bottleneck due to slow throughput and long build times. In this article, we propose a solution targeting designs composed of modular blocks connected by latency-insensitive interfaces. Our approach is to construct the hardware simulation in a similar fashion as the design itself, using a prebuilt simulator for each block and connecting the simulators via fast shared-memory queues at runtime. This improves build time, because simulation scale-up simply involves running more instances of the prebuilt simulators. It also addresses simulation speed, because prebuilt simulators can run in parallel, without fine-grained synchronization or global barriers. We introduce a framework, Switchboard, that implements our approach, and discuss two applications, demonstrating its speed, scalability, and accuracy: (1) a web application where users can run fast simulations of chiplets on an interposer, and (2) a wafer-scale simulation of one million RISC-V cores distributed across thousands of cloud compute cores.<|reference_end|>
@article{herbst2024switchboard:,
    title={Switchboard: An Open-Source Framework for Modular Simulation of Large
  Hardware Systems},
    author={Steven Herbst, Noah Moroze, Edgar Iglesias, Andreas Olofsson},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2407.20537},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2407.20537},
    primaryClass={cs.DC cs.AR}
}