MLSYSIM: First-Principles Infrastructure Modeling for Machine Learning Systems
For ML system architects and researchers, it provides a rapid, full-stack reasoning tool that replaces empirical profiling and cycle-accurate simulation, addressing the lack of infrastructure for architectural exploration.
MLSYSIM is a first-principles analytical framework for modeling ML systems across scales from microcontrollers to datacenters, enabling sub-second design-space exploration that identifies binding constraints and synthesizes ideal hardware specifications.
As machine learning shifts from laboratory curiosity to critical infrastructure, the systems that sustain it span an extraordinary range, from sub-milliwatt microcontrollers to multi-gigawatt datacenter fleets. Reasoning across this range is hard: empirical profiling requires the target hardware in hand, while cycle-accurate simulation costs hours per configuration, leaving no tool for rapid, full-stack architectural reasoning. We present MLSYSIM (Machine Learning Systems Infrastructure Modeling), a first-principles analytical framework that formalizes the "physics of systems" into a dimensionally-strict Python engine. MLSysim is built on a demand-supply abstraction that decouples computational demand from silicon supply and environmental context, and it enforces unit integrity at runtime so the silent conversion errors that plague ad-hoc modeling cannot occur. Every input is drawn from a typed, provenance-tracked registry, so no number enters an analysis without a documented source. On this engine we codify a taxonomy of 22 "Systems Walls" resolved by 28 composable models and solvers, enabling sub-second design-space exploration that identifies binding constraints and synthesizes ideal hardware specifications across the entire ML systems lifecycle.