Architectural Exploration with Liberty

The Liberty Simulation Environment Release Party!!!

MICRO-36 in San Diego, California

Afternoon Session, December 2, 2003

The Liberty Simulation Environment (LSE) is a simulator construction framework designed to provide an improved modeling methodology to the computer architecture community. This methodology involves the natural description of hardware to a simulator builder, rather than the conventional coding of a program which computes its timing. Using LSE avoids many of the pitfalls of the traditional approach, freeing the architect to think about hardware rather than simulator software engineering. Hardware components and descriptions in LSE are structural and concurrent like real hardware, but flexible enough to exhibit high degrees of reuse. These properties of LSE models make LSE an attractive system for rapid exploration of a diverse set of designs, for collaboration via model sharing, and for the accurate expression of architectural ideas.

Two years ago, at MICRO-34, we revealed the Liberty Simulation Environment. Since that time, a number of academic and industrial groups have adopted LSE for their research work in our limited release program. Further development of LSE, driven by feedback and testing, has made the system suitable for a broader release. This tutorial marks the official world-wide public release of The Liberty Simulation Environment Version 1.0.

Participants of this tutorial will be given a first hand look at the Liberty Simulation Environment. We will describe the LSE methodology and the system itself including the simulator builder and the model visualizer. Example LSE models ranging in complexity from DLX to multiple-core IA-64 machines will be presented. The future of LSE and its potential to provide a design entry point for hardware synthesis will be explored.

Visit The Liberty Research Group for more information.

Tutorial Organizer:

David August, Princeton University     ( august at cs.princeton.edu )
 

Contributors:

Manish Vachharajani, Princeton University
Jason Blome, Princeton University
Neil Vachharajani, Princeton University
David Penry, Princeton University
Ram Rangan, Princeton University