The CAMINOS interconnection networks simulator

Abstract

This work presents CAMINOS, a new interconnection network simulator focusing on router microarchitecture. It was developed in Rust, a novel programming language with a syntax similar to C/C++ and strong memory protection. The architecture of CAMINOS emphasizes the composition of components. This allows new designs to be defined in a configuration file without modifying source code, greatly reducing effort and time. In addition to simulation functionality, CAMINOS assists in managing a collection of simulations as an experiment. This includes integration with SLURM to support executing batches of simulations and generating PDFs with results and diagnostics. We show that CAMINOS makes good use of computing resources. Its memory usage is dominated by in-flight messages, showing low overhead in memory usage. We attest that CAMINOS can effectively use CPU time, as scenarios with little contention execute faster.