COTSon is a full system simulation infrastructure developed by HP Labs to model complete computing systems ranging from multicore nodes up to scale-out clusters with complete network simulation. It is a pluggable architecture, in which end users can can develop their own modules, thus providing a very flexible simulation platform for a wide variety of modeling needs. The functional emulation is based on AMD's SimNow and supports x86 and x86_64 platforms.

There are tons of simulators out there, so why a new one? COTSon is not just another simulator, it is a simulation infrastructure. Our holistic approach targets the whole system at once, because we believe that understanding today's and tomorrow multicore and multithreaded architectures requires taking the whole system into account, including devices and the operating system.

As a design principle, COTSon trades off accuracy for speed and viceversa, dynamically allowing end users to determine the interesting parts of their application, and enables large space explorations at high simulation speeds. The primary expected use of COTSon is as a modeling tool to collect performance (or energy) metrics for decision support.

By publicly releasing the tool in Jan 2010 under the MIT Open Source License, we hope COTSon can become the simulation platform of choice for modeling and simulation of next-generation computing systems. If you use COTSon for your research, please use the following reference

Argollo, E., Falcón, A., Faraboschi, P., Monchiero, M., and Ortega, D. 2009.
COTSon: infrastructure for full system simulation.
SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev. 43, 1 (Jan. 2009), 52-61

@article{cotson-osr09,
 author = {Argollo, Eduardo and Falc\'{o}n, Ayose and Faraboschi, Paolo and Monchiero, Matteo and Ortega, Daniel},
 title = {COTSon: infrastructure for full system simulation},
 journal = {SIGOPS Oper. Syst. Rev.},
 volume = {43},
 number = {1},
 year = {2009},
 issn = {0163-5980},
 pages = {52--61},
 doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1496909.1496921},
 publisher = {ACM},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
}

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