CAREER: Transforming Computer System Design

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This project attacks the high costs of architecting, implementation,and verifying computer systems as well as developing system andapplication software through the use of FPGA-Accelerate SimulationTechnologies (FAST) simulators. Rather than having to develop adistinct set of simulation and evaluation tools for each task, FASTsimulators have been demonstrated to be both accurate enough andsufficiently easy to write to be useful to architects and are bothfull-system and fast enough to be useful to software developers.Initial FAST prototypes were not, however, directly useful to computersystem implementation and verfication. In addition, there is nomature methodology to verify FAST simulators themselves.The specification of a FAST simulator, however, contains sufficientinformation to specify a set of implementations, thus begging thequestion of whether one or more implementations could be automaticallygenerated from such a specification. This project is developing atool chain to automatically transform a FAST simulator specificationinto an implementation, thus coupling architecture, implementation andsoftware development, permitting all to be co-developed and making iteasy for each to influence the other two. An implementation can alsobe verified using conventional methods, meaning such an automatictransformation provides a conventional method to verify FASTsimulators.