CAREER: Transforming Computer System Design

该项目通过使用现场可编程门阵列加速仿真技术(FAST)模拟器，解决了设计、实现和验证计算机系统以及开发系统和应用软件的高成本问题。FAST模拟器不需要为每个任务开发一套不同的模拟和评估工具，它已经被证明既足够准确，又足够容易编写，对架构师有用，而且足够全系统，足够快，对软件开发人员有用。然而，最初的快速原型对计算机系统的实施和验证并不直接有用。然而，快速模拟器的规范包含了足够的信息来指定一组实现，从而回避了是否可以从这样的规范自动生成一个或多个实现的问题。该项目正在开发工具链，以自动将快速模拟器规范转换为实现，从而将体系结构、实现和软件开发结合在一起，允许所有这些都被共同开发，并使每一个都很容易影响其他两个。也可以使用传统方法来验证实现，这意味着这种自动转换提供了验证FAST模拟器的传统方法。

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.