Existing solid state drive (SSD) simulators unfortunately lack hardware
and/or software architecture models. Consequently, they are far from capturing
the critical features of contemporary SSD devices. More importantly, while the
performance of modern systems that adopt SSDs can vary based on their numerous
internal design parameters and storage-level configurations, a full system
simulation with traditional SSD models often requires unreasonably long
runtimes and excessive computational resources. In this work, we propose
SimpleSSD, a highfidelity simulator that models all detailed characteristics of
hardware and software, while simplifying the nondescript features of storage
internals. In contrast to existing SSD simulators, SimpleSSD can easily be
integrated into publicly-available full system simulators. In addition, it can
accommodate a complete storage stack and evaluate the performance of SSDs along
with diverse memory technologies and microarchitectures. Thus, it facilitates
simulations that explore the full design space at different levels of system
abstraction.Comment: This paper has been accepted at IEEE Computer Architecture Letters
(CAL