TSim4CXL: Trace-Driven Simulation Framework for CXL-Based High-Performance Computing Systems

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-99854-6_6

TSim4CXL: Trace-Driven Simulation Framework for CXL-Based High-Performance Computing Systems

2026-01-01

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DOI：10.1007/978-3-031-99854-6_6

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Compute Express Link (CXL) is recognized as a revolutionary technology in high-performance computing (HPC) system design, driven by the growing demand for efficient and scalable memory solutions tailored to memory-centric workloads. However, despite its potential, evaluating CXL performance in real-world scenarios is challenging due to the lack of CXL hardware and the high costs of building a large-scale distributed system. To address this, we propose TSim4CXL, a novel trace-driven simulation framework for CXL-based HPC systems that provides accurate timing simulations within a practical timeframe. TSim4CXL separates computing resources from the CXL memory system, generating traces and simulating the memory system using SystemC's discrete-event modeling. By modeling the CXL interconnect at the protocol level with various configuration parameters, TSim4CXL allows us to explore the design space of HPC architecture. The accuracy of our CXL simulation model is validated using CXL hardware provided by Samsung Electronics. First, we compare load latencies using a custom microbenchmark on CXL hardware with simulation results and adjust the CXL parameters in our simulator accordingly. Second, we assess communication latency by running LAMMPS applications, ensuring the simulation results align with real-world performance. In addition, we perform design space exploration with two memory-centric applications, up to 25 CPU nodes for LAMMPS and 4 GPU nodes for LLM training. Furthermore, we compare the performance of target applications by executing multiple DRAM simulators, demonstrating how the memory bandwidth affects simulated time. These experiments prove the viability of the proposed simulation framework.

Keywords:

Compute Express Link(CXL)

High-Performance Computing (HPC)

Trace-driven Simulation

TSim4CXL: Trace-Driven Simulation Framework for CXL-Based High-Performance Computing Systems

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