Hardware and Software configurations

Before measuring the efficiency of a simulator, one needs to check whether he has chosen the right hardware and software configuration.


The general guidelines for choosing HW & SW configuration which can increase the simulator performance are:
[1] Faster the processor, better performance. Multi-core processors can give more.
[2] L2 cache matters a lot for run-time
[3] Linux is better
[4] Opteron processors have built-in memory controller which helps simulators
[5] High speed disk drives like 10000 rpm would be very useful
[6] Fast DDR memory is critical
[7] Make sure that you have enough RAM so that the process does not swap - as it kills all performance.
[8] Large cache

Let us discuss about the various other factors that also affect the speed of the simulators in my next article.