SimBricks

SimBricks streamlines the design, implementation, and evaluation of heterogeneous computer systems to lower cost and shorten development time by enabling full system virtual prototyping. Today’s computer systems comprising increasingly specialized combinations of software and hardware components — hardware accelerators, network/interconnect topologies, quantum processors, etc. — are expensive and slow to develop, implement, and deploy. SimBricks allows both operators and hardware designers, to run complete systems including custom hardware components and full software stacks, including full OS, applications etc., virtually in simulation. Hardware designers can evaluate design choices for new components as part of complete virtual systems with simpler high-level models early on, and then refine designs iteratively. This brings the hardware design/implementation process closer to iterative and agile process of designing software, being able to run the system every step of the way. Operators looking to configure and deploy their applications on heterogeneous systems, can explore different system architectures and choices of components and their impact on their application before buying and deploying components. This can significantly speed up the process, reduce cost and risk, and result in better system designs. SimBricks takes a modular approach and realizes virtual prototypes by integrating many different simulators for different components and from different vendors, open source and proprietary, and allows users to connect and combine them flexibly into complete systems and with the right configuration for a particular use-case.