The DiskSim Simulation Environment
(Version 2.0)
Contacts:
Greg Ganger, Bruce
Worthington and Yale Patt
NOTE: Instead of contacting the authors directly to find out more, or comment on disksim, please send mail to
.
NOTE: DiskSim 2.0 has been replaced with a new
version.
DiskSim is an efficient, accurate, highly-configurable disk system
simulator developed at the University of Michigan and enhanced at CMU
to support research into various aspects of storage subsystem architecture.
It is written in C and requires no special system software (just basic
POSIX interfaces). DiskSim includes modules for most secondary storage
components of interest, including device drivers, buses, controllers,
adapters, and disk drives. DiskSim also includes support for a number
of externally-provided trace formats and internally-generated synthetic
workloads, and includes hooks for inclusion in a larger scale system-level
simulator. It has been used in a variety of published studies (and several
unpublished studies) to understand modern storage subsystem performance
[Ganger93a,
Worthington94],
to understand how storage performance relates to overall system performance
[Ganger93,
Ganger95,
Ganger95a],
and to evaluate new storage subsystem architectures [Worthington95a].
DiskSim 2.0 has been validated both as part of a more comprehensive
system-level model and as a standalone subsystem. In particular, the
disk module (which is extremely detailed) has been carefully validated
against 10 different disk models from 5 different manufacturers. The
accuracy demonstrated exceeds that of any other disk simulator known
to the authors (e.g., see Ruemmler and Wilkes' article in the March
1994 issue of IEEE Computer).
Parameters for some disks against which we have validated DiskSim
are included with the source code release (see below). For 4 of these
disks, the parameters were extracted by a set of semi-automated, on-line
algorithms described in [Worthington95,
Worthington96].
For another 5 disks, the parameters were extracted automatically by
a new disk characterization tool called
DIXtrac. Additional DIXtrac-provided parameters are
added periodically to our on-line database
of disk parameters.
A fairly complete description of what DiskSim can do and how to use
it can be found in the Reference Manual below.
Status
DiskSim has been made freely available in order to further storage
system research (and computer system research that in some way includes
the storage system). All we ask is that you let us know, if and when
you can, that you are using and what kind of fabulous things you do
with it.
- Latest version of DiskSim
- Version 2.0 code and documentation:
Please send bug reports, experiences, and problems to
.
If you find disksim useful, please let us know about it! Find more info
about the DiskSim mailing lists here.
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