Authors: Greg Ganger, Bruce Worthington and Yale Patt
NOTE: Instead of contacting the authors directly to find out more, or comment on disksim, please send mail to .
NOTE: DiskSim 1.0 has been replaced with a new version.
DiskSim is an efficient, accurate, highly-configurable disk system simulator developed at the University of Michigan to support research into various aspects of storage subsystem architecture. It is written in C and requires no special system software (just basic POSIX interfaces). DiskSim includes modules for most secondary storage components of interest, including device drivers, buses, controllers, adapters, and disk drives. DiskSim also includes support for a number of externally-provided trace formats and internally-generated synthetic workloads, and includes hooks for inclusion in a larger scale system-level simulator. It has been used in a variety of published studies (and several unpublished studies) to understand modern storage subsystem performance [Ganger93a, Worthington94], to understand how storage performance relates to overall system performance [Ganger93, Ganger95, Ganger95a], and to evaluate new storage subsystem architectures [Worthington95a].
DiskSim has been validated both as part of a more comprehensive system-level model and as a standalone subsystem. In particular, the disk module (which is extremely detailed) has been carefully validated against five different disk models from three different manufacturers. The accuracy demonstrated far exceeds that of any other disk simulator known to the authors (e.g., see Ruemmler and Wilkes' article in the March 1994 issue of IEEE Computer).
The parameters for the disks against which we have validated DiskSim are included with the source code release (see below). For 4 of these disks, the parameters were extracted by a set of semi-automated, on-line algorithms described in [Worthington95, Worthington96].
A fairly complete description of what DiskSim can do and how to use
it can be found in the Reference Manual below.
DiskSim has been made freely available in order to further storage
system research (and computer system research that in some way includes
the storage system). All we ask is that you let us know, if and when
you can, that you are using and what kind of fabulous things you do
with it.
Latest version of DiskSim
Please send bug reports, experiences, and problems to . If you find disksim useful, please let us know about it! Find more info about the DiskSim mailing lists here.