The Sunflower Tool Suite — Hardware and Software Research Platforms for EnergyConstrained.pdfVIP

The Sunflower Tool Suite — Hardware and Software Research Platforms for Energy-Constrained and Failure-Prone Systems Phillip Stanley-Marbell Technische Universiteit Eindhoven, Den Dolech 2, Eindhoven 5612 AZ, The Netherlands. Abstract. Research in any field requires tools that enable modeling sys- tem characteristics of interest. Such tools, whether analytic, simulative, or hardware-based, must enable the accurate evaluation of relevant aspects of a system that may influence its perceived utility. In computing systems research, software tools (notably, simulators) provide low-cost, flexible, and low turn-around time facilities for investi- gations, 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 ex- pensive 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 simula- tion 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 develop- ment). 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