SST: A modelling framework integrating Gem5, DRAMSim, McPAT and other components

The world of High Performance Computing is facing a number of major challenges, from new underlying technology constraints (power and energy constraints, legacy codes, GPGPUs) to new problem domains (informatics and graph applications). All of these challenges are unified by a single common thread: data movement. Data movement (to/from memory or the network) dominates the performance of all of our applications and, increasingly, dominates the power large HPC systems consume. Reducing the amount of data which needs to be moved and making movement more efficient is the number one architectural goal and focus of Sandia's architecture efforts. This talk will look at several techniques Sandia is exploring to tackle the data movement problem, with a focus on 3D stacking, Silicon Photonics, and processing-in-memory. Additionally, the Structural Simulation Toolkit, an architectural simulation framework developed at Sandia, will be presented, along with work on integrating the SST with GeM5.