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From Magma
What is Magma about?
Magma is a fast and accurate thermal-aware design architectural simulator which provides capability for design space exploration, offline and online dynamic thermal management. The simulator is capable of handling simulations of hundreds of cores with various degrees of accuracy within reasonable time. The key advantage of Magma is the ease of use with most power models used in research community like PTscalar and Wattch. It has a simple graphical user interface, which allows user to control most of the simulation parameters at one place. Use of Matlab for programming simulator enables the developer to make use of Matlab's vast library resources. It also makes the simulator very portable on most systems.
Main Features
- Design space exploration - Magma helps in exploring the tradeoffs in various design parameters like number of cores, package thermal properties, etc.
- Dynamic thermal management - Magma provides both offline and online dynamic thermal management for maximizing performance under thermal constraints. By making use of selective properties and effective algorithms complex control determination is determined in real time.
- Leakage dependence on temperature - Magma includes the effect of leakage power dependence on temperature in simulations, which is very significant for 65 nm and later generations. The simulator also allows users to choose leakage models to tradeoff accuracy with simulation time.
- Thread migration - Magma provides capability of simulating design space exploration and thermal management with different schemes of thread migration. Thread migration is commonly adopted to improve performance and reduce temperature gradients.
News
- 2009-June-09: Magma version 1.0 is released for public use.
Download
- The current version of Magma is made available for public use at Download.
Documentation
- The detailed documentation of installation and use of Magma is available on this wiki under Documentation.
- The simulator code is commented and is available as html documentation with the simulator download.
Publications
A list of publications on which Magma is built and the publications using Magma is available. Please cite the most relevant publication and also append to the list of publications using Magma.
Acknowledgements
This material is based upon the work developed with the support from NSF Grants (CSR-EHS 0509540), the Science Foundation Arizona (SRG 0211-07), the Stardust Foundation and from Raytheon Missile Systems, Tucson Arizona. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the sponsoring agencies.
