{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/firesim-fpga-accelerated-cycle-exact-scale","title":"FireSim: FPGA-Accelerated Cycle-Exact Scale-Out System Simulation in the Public Cloud","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2018-06-02","proceeding":"45th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA 2018) 2018 6","authors":["Sagar Karandikar","Howard Mao","Donggyu Kim","David Biancolin","Alon Amid","Dayeol Lee","Nathan Pemberton","Emmanuel Amaro","Colin Schmidt","Aditya Chopra","Qijing Huang","Kyle Kovacs","Borivoje Nikolic","Randy Katz","Jonathan Bachrach","Krste Asanovic"],"abstract":"We present FireSim, an open-source simulation platform that enables cycle-exact microarchitectural simulation of large scale-out clusters by combining FPGA-accelerated simulation of silicon-proven RTL designs with a scalable, distributed network simulation. Unlike prior FPGA-accelerated simulation tools, FireSim runs on Amazon EC2 F1, a public cloud FPGA platform, which greatly improves usability, provides elasticity, and lowers the cost of large-scale FPGAbased experiments. We describe the design and implementation of FireSim and show how it can provide sufficient performance to run modern applications at scale, to enable true hardware-software co-design. As an example, we demonstrate automatically generating and deploying a target cluster of 1,024 3.2 GHz quad-core server nodes, each with 16 GB of DRAM, interconnected by a 200 Gbit/s network with 2 microsecond latency, which simulates at a 3.4 MHz processor clock rate (less than 1,000x slowdown over real-time). In aggregate, this FireSim instantiation simulates 4,096 cores and 16 TB of memory, runs ˜14 billion instructions per second, and harnesses 12.8 million dollars worth of FPGAs—at a total cost of only ˜$100 per simulation hour to the user. We present several examples to show how FireSim can be used to explore various research directions in warehouse-scale machine design, including modeling networks with high-bandwidth and low-latency, integrating arbitrary RTL designs for a variety of commodity and specialized datacenter nodes, and modeling a variety of datacenter organizations, as well as reusing the scale-out FireSim infrastructure to enable fast, massively parallel cycle-exact single-node microarchitectural experimentation.","url_abs":"https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3276543","url_pdf":"https://sagark.org/assets/pubs/firesim-isca2018.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"firesim-fpga-accelerated-cycle-exact-scale","repo_url":"https://github.com/firesim/firesim","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}