Senior Design Projects

ECS193 A/B Winter & Spring 2019

Visualizing Computer Architecture Simulation

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Jason Lowe-Power
UC Davis

Project's details

Visualizing Computer Architecture Simulation
In computer architecture research, we often use software simulators to predict the performance impact of new hardware designs. These software simulators can be *incredibly complex*. For instance, the open source simulator gem5 has over 300,000 lines of C++ code. Therefore, these systems are very user unfriendly often requiring significant C++ and/or Python knowledge to accomplish simple tasks. gem5 ( gem5.org, gem5.googlesource.com ) is an open source computer architecture simulator used in academia and in industry. gem5 has been under development for at least 15 years and since 2011 gem5 has been cited by over 2600 publications. gem5 is also used by many industrial research labs including ARM Research, AMD Research, Google, Micron, Metempsy, HP, Samsung, and others.
This project will add a GUI front end to help users configure the system they are simulating with gem5. gem5 currently has a sophisticated Python-based configuration system. This configuration system is incredibly powerful, but it is also difficult for new users to understand. This new front end will allow users to drag-and-drop components of the system ( e.g., CPU, memory, caches ) and connect them with a visual interface. This project will be upstreamed as part of the gem5 open source project which is used across the world by both academic labs and industrial research labs.
A GUI application and the corresponding code that will hook into the current gem5 code base to configure and drive the simulator system.
Linux GUI platform experience ( e.g., Qt, GTK, etc. ) C++ Python User interface design
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30-60 min weekly or more
Open source project
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