The Sunflower Tool Suite — Hardware and Software Research Platforms for Energy-Constrained and Failure-Prone SystemsPhillip Stanley-Marbell.Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings 07041 Power-aware Computing Systems, http://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2007/1107
In computing systems research, software tools (notably, simulators) provide low-cost, flexible, and low turn-around time facilities for investigations, but abstract away many hardware details, often resulting in a loss in accuracy of modeling. Hardware implementations provide the ultimate proofs of concept, but require hardware design expertise, are usually expensive and inflexible, and are not always designed to expose all possible system parameters to researchers. They are also rarely the subject of active evolution over time as research platforms in their own right, as software tools are.
The Sunflower tool suite is a suite of hardware platforms and simulation tools,
intended to address these concerns. It comprises a full-system
(embedded microarchitecture, networking, power, battery, device failure
and analog signal modeling) simulator, a miniature energy-scavenging
hardware platform, and a handheld computing device (under development).
The suite is intended to provide a set of complementary platforms
for research in micro- and system-architectures for embedded systems,
with emphases on energy-efficiency, fault-tolerance, and ecological impact
of deployed hardware.
|