The Sunflower Tool Suite --- Hardware and Software Research Platforms for Energy-Constrained and Failure-Prone Systems

Abstract

Research in any field requires tools that enable modeling system
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 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.