HASE: A Flexible Toolset for Computer Architects

HASE is a Hierarchical computer Architecture design and Simulation Environment (HASE) which allows for the rapid development and exploration of computer architectures at multiple levels of abstraction, encompassing both hardware and software. The components of a computer system lend themselves naturally to being modelled as objects, so HASE has been implemented in an object- oriented language. Within HASE there are graphical entity design and edit facilities, entity library creation and retrieval mechanisms, an animator, and statistical analysis and experimentation tools for deriving system performance metrics. HASE uses an object-oriented database management system (ObjectStore) to make the design objects and the entity library persistent. For each architecture model HASE allows many experiments with varying parameters to be performed. The database facilities provided through HASE manage not only the results of each experiment, but also their relationship to the state of the architecture model that produced these results, including all input and output parameters and their values during the experiment. This paper describes the design of HASE, some of the varied projects which have used it, and the future direction of the system.

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