Sunflower is a full-system emulator for embedded sensing, computation, communication, fault modeling, power dissipation, batteries, and more. It is designed for use in research where you would normally need to have several embedded hardware systems networked over wired or wireless interfaces. Sunflower allows you to take compiled binaries and emulate them instruction by instruction, while emulating the effect of that computation on power dissipation, emulating the effect of the power dissipation on power regulators, modeling the effect of current drawn on electrochemical battery state of charge, and doing all of this for multiple complete embedded systems (tens or even hundreds) networked over wired or wireless networks or integrated into a single chip and communicating over shared memory.
Figure 1. An example of a system configuration that can be emulated in Sunflower.
The correct way to clone this repository to get the simulator and the submodules it depends on is:
git clone --recursive https://github.com/physical-computation/sunflower-simulator.git
To update all submodules:
git pull --recurse-submodules
git submodule update --remote --recursive
Checkout master branch and take each submodule out of the "Detached HEAD" state:
git submodule foreach git checkout master
Read the manual (sunflowersim-manual-and-cover.pdf) if you can. Dependencies: Building the simulator depends on GNU awk (gawk), on the GNU version of bison, and the GNU version of sed, so install them.
Edit conf/setup.conf to match your installation directory and system setup. On macOS, use the configuration:
OSTYPE = darwin
MACHTYPE = x86_64
On Linux, use the configuration
OSTYPE = linux
MACHTYPE = i386
To configure the emulator to default to RISC-V processor support rather than Hitachi SuperH, you will want:
TARGET = riscv
TARGET-ARCH = riscv32-elf
Set the paths to the GNU awk, GNU bison, and GNU sed in conf/setup.conf. Once you have edited conf/setup.conf, follow the instructions in the submodule sunflower-toolchain to build the cross-compiler.
The configuration file conf/setup.conf primarily determines the compilation of the simulator for a given target platform and the default cross-compilers that get built when you run make cross. It does not determine the default emulated processor in Sunflower. Setting, e.g., TARGET = riscv sets the default cross-compiler to build for RISC-V and only influences the default target of make cross.
The default processor instances when you launch sim are SuperH. You can create RISC-V instances using the sunflower command newnode riscv. You can explicitly request SuperH instances using the command newnode superh. You can have a mix of SuperH and RISC-V processors in the same simulation (i.e., in the same launch of sim). From the simulator’s perspective, both architectures are always supported and it is not possible to purposefully configure the sim for one or the other.
Phillip Stanley-Marbell and Michael Hsiao. “Fast, Flexible, Cycle-accurate Energy Estimation”. In Proceedings of the 2001 International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design, ISLPED ’01. Huntington Beach, California, USA: ACM, pp. 141–146. ISBN: 1-58113-371-5. doi: 10.1145/ 383082.383120.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{Stanley-Marbell:2001:FFC,
author = {Phillip Stanley-Marbell and Michael Hsiao},
title = {Fast, Flexible, Cycle-accurate Energy Estimation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2001 International Symposium
on Low Power Electronics and Design},
series = {ISLPED '01},
year = {2001},
isbn = {1-58113-371-5},
location = {Huntington Beach, California, USA},
pages = {141--146},
numpages = {6},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}
Phillip Stanley-Marbell and Diana Marculescu. “Sunflower: Full-system, Embedded, Microarchitecture Evaluation”. In Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers. HiPEAC’07. Ghent, Belgium: Springer-Verlag, pp. 168–182. ISBN: 978-3-540-69337-6.
BibTeX:
@inproceedings{Stanley-Marbell:2007:SFE,
author = {Phillip Stanley-Marbell and Diana Marculescu},
title = {Sunflower: Full-system, Embedded, Microarchitecture Evaluation},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on
High Performance Embedded Architectures and Compilers},
series = {HiPEAC'07},
year = {2007},
isbn = {978-3-540-69337-6},
location = {Ghent, Belgium},
pages = {168--182},
numpages = {15},
publisher = {Springer-Verlag},
address = {Berlin, Heidelberg},
}