Architecture Exploration for Data Intensive Applications

This paper presents Compass, a hardware/software simulator for data-intensive applications. Currently focusing on in-memory stores, the objective of the simulator is to explore diverse algorithms and hardware architectures, serving as an aid to design systems for applications in which the elevated rate of data transfers dictates their behaviour. Instead of simulating the devices of a conventional computing system, in Compass the modules represent the stages of the procedure to attend a request to store, retrieve, or delete information in a particular memory architecture, giving the simulator the flexibility to test and analyze several different algorithms, components, and ideas. The system maintains a cycle-accurate model that makes it easy to interface it with simulators of physical devices such as RAM memories. Under a scheme like this one, the simulator of a physical memory in the system anchors the timing to a realistic scenario, but the rest of the components can be easily modified to explore alternative approaches.