As the demand for feature-rich mobile systems such as smart phones and wearables has outpaced other computing systems and is expected to continue at a faster rate, it is projected that mobile systems with tens of cores and hundreds of accelerators (IPs) will be designed to provide unprecedented level of features and functionality in future. Design of such systems with the required QoS and power budgets along with other design constraints will be a daunting task for computer architects, since any ad hoc, piece-meal solution is unlikely to result in an optimal design. This requires early exploration of the complete design space to understand the system-level design trade-offs. Unlike a rich set of simulation tools available for conducting architecture research, there is no publicly available simulation infrastructure for design and evaluation of existing and emerging handheld platforms that covers the complete hardware and software stack.
The goal of this CRI Community Infrastructure (CI) project is to develop an open-source simulation tool, called GEMDROID, for facilitating architectural research on mobile platforms. The project encompasses the following tasks:(i) Integrate the open-source Android emulator, GEM5 architecture simulator and a wide variety of IPs and sensors to faithfully simulate a wide variety of mobile applications on a target SoC platform; (ii) Incorporate power modelling tools in GEMDROID for power/energy analyses; (iii) Extend GEMDROID to simulate wearables/IoTs; (iv) Validate the performance and power models with detailed measurements; and (v) Develop a benchmark suite for handheld platforms.The proposed GEMDROID simulator is expected to be the first open-source tool for researchers and practitioners to conduct a wide variety of design and evaluation work on mobile systems. The platform would be disseminated to the broad research community, with regular workshops and tutorial organized for building a community of users and developers for this toolset. The infrastructure would serve as a teaching aid in our undergraduate and graduate courses on mobile architectures. The outreach activities include participation in the U-Science program at Penn State to engage K-12 students, educators, undergraduate and graduate students, and interested community members in the STEM fields and the VIEW (Visit-In-Engineering Weekend) program to expose them to this important area.
