Sunflower : Full-System, Embedded Microarchitecture Evaluation

This paper describes Sunflower, a full-system microarchitectural evaluation environment for embedded computing systems. The environment enables detailed microarchitectural simulation of multiple instances of complete embedded systems, their peripherals, and medium access control / physical layer communication between systems. The environment models the microarchitecture, computation and communication upset events under a variety of stochastic distributions, compute and communication power consumption, electrochemical battery systems, and power regulation circuitry, as well as analog signals external to the processing elements. The simulation environment provides facilities for speeding up simulation performance, which tradeoff accuracy of simulated properties for simulation speed. Through the detailed simulation of benchmarks in which the effect of simulation speedup on correctness can be accurately quantified, it is demonstrated that traditional techniques proposed for simulation speedup can introduce significant error when simulating a combination of computation and analog physical phenomena external to a processor.