Currently Proteus only supports the DEC 5000 mips based workstation. Versions are available from the developers that will run on Sun architectures. At the time of our research, the Sun version was not stable. Once this newer version is available, our network module could be integrated to make operation of our simulation less platform dependent.
Modeling of the processor elements and the interconnection network was a very valuable first effort, but in a parallel environment, PEs are only part of the performance picture. I/O can dominate in many situations, and currently we do not model a disk subsystem. Either integration of an existing disk model simulator, or creating one will be investigated. This will allow tight control (such as, file block layout) of the I/O subsytem allowing for doing better performance characterizing.
Once the disk system is available, one of our original goals could be realized. That is, to use the simulator as a tool for performance evaluation and possibly performance prediction for an existing runtime library for parallel I/O.