Zi-Yi Tai | Searcharxiv

arXiv2026

ACALSim: A Scalable Parallel Simulation Framework for High-Performance System Design Space Exploration

Architectural simulation has become the critical bottleneck limiting design space exploration for high-performance computing systems. Modern GPUs and AI accelerators -- with hundreds to thousands of tightly-coupled components -- demand simulation frameworks that deliver efficient parallelism and scalable single-node execution. Existing frameworks fall short: SST focuses on multi-node MPI scalability but struggles with intra-node scaling, while GPGPU-Sim remains largely single-threaded. Critically, none expose a mechanism for users to optimize threading for their specific workloads. We introduce ACALSim, a scalable parallel simulation framework providing infrastructure and APIs for building high-performance simulators -- timing-model accuracy remains the responsibility of simulator developers. Its key innovation is a pluggable thread-management architecture that lets developers implement custom scheduling strategies tailored to specific simulation patterns, absent in existing frameworks. Complementing it are (1) event-driven execution with fast-forward to eliminate idle-cycle overhead, (2) a shared-memory data model enabling zero-copy communication, and (3) a two-phase parallel execution model for deterministic thread scaling. We demonstrate ACALSim through HPCSim, a GPU simulator targeting A100-class architectures. Against an SST implementation using identical shared timing cores to isolate framework overhead, ACALSim achieves over 14x speedup with 41% lower memory footprint; hardware validation confirms 0.72--1.22x cycle-count correlation with A100 measurements. While SST fails to complete 256+ thread-block workloads within practical time limits, ACALSim simulates full LLaMA transformer layers (single block) in 17.7 minutes for LLaMA-7B and 30.4 minutes for LLaMA-13B -- enabling design space exploration that SST cannot achieve.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

Tight Lower Bounds for Directed Cut Sparsification and Distributed Min-Cut

In this paper, we consider two fundamental cut approximation problems on large graphs. We prove new lower bounds for both problems that are optimal up to logarithmic factors. The first problem is to approximate cuts in balanced directed graphs. In this problem, the goal is to build a data structure that $(1 \pm ε)$-approximates cut values in graphs with $n$ vertices. For arbitrary directed graphs, such a data structure requires $Ω(n^2)$ bits even for constant $ε$. To circumvent this, recent works study $β$-balanced graphs, meaning that for every directed cut, the total weight of edges in one direction is at most $β$ times that in the other direction. We consider two models: the {\em for-each} model, where the goal is to approximate each cut with constant probability, and the {\em for-all} model, where all cuts must be preserved simultaneously. We improve the previous $Ω(n \sqrt{β/ε})$ lower bound to $\tildeΩ(n \sqrtβ/ε)$ in the for-each model, and we improve the previous $Ω(n β/ε)$ lower bound to $Ω(n β/ε^2)$ in the for-all model. This resolves the main open questions of (Cen et al., ICALP, 2021). The second problem is to approximate the global minimum cut in a local query model, where we can only access the graph via degree, edge, and adjacency queries. We improve the previous $Ω\bigl(\frac{m}{k}\bigr)$ query complexity lower bound to $Ω\bigl(\min\{m, \frac{m}{ε^2 k}\}\bigr)$ for this problem, where $m$ is the number of edges, $k$ is the size of the minimum cut, and we seek a $(1+ε)$-approximation. In addition, we show that existing upper bounds with slight modifications match our lower bound up to logarithmic factors.

cs.DS↗