Unichos: a full system simulator for thin client platform

ABSTRACT

Thin client is a kind of interactive and graphics device in client/server and browser/server environment, which combines local and remote computing resources. The applications on the thin client (e.g., browsers) often heavily rely on the support of operating system and the functionalities of network and graphics. Hence, traditional performance evaluation methods, such as instrumentation and application-level simulation, cannot help due to their inherent limitation. This paper presents the design and implementation of Unichos, a full system simulator for thin client platform. Unichos models the complete target hardware system in object-oriented structure, and supports the unmodified Linux 2.4 kernel and graphics and network applications. Unichos is the first full system simulator, which focuses on portability for more architectures of thin client platforms by combining the retargetable instruction template and the extensible device model. Finally, we present the Unichos performance under detailed simulation status and introduce two case studies which demonstrate the advantages of Unichos for performance evaluation.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Measurement techniques

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.4 PERFORMANCE OF SYSTEMS
      Subjects: Modeling techniques

General Terms:
Design, Performance

Keywords:
computer architecture, full system simulation, performance evaluation, thin client