DRIVE: An Interpretive Simulation and Visualization Environment for Dynamically Reconfigurable Systems

Current simulation tools for reconngurable systems are based on low level simulation of application designs developed in a High-level Description Language(HDL) on HDL models of architectures. This necessitates expertise on behalf of the user to generate the low level design before performance analysis can be accomplished. Most of the current simulation tools also are based on static designs and do not support analysis of dynamic reconnguration. We propose a novel interpretive simulation and visualization environment which alleviates these problems. The Dynamically Reconngurable systems Interpretive simulation and Visualization Environment(DRIVE) framework can be utilized for performance evaluation and architecture and design space exploration. Interpretive simulation measures the performance of an application by executing an abstract application model on an abstract parameterized system architecture model. The simulation and visualization framework is being developed in Java language and supports modularity and extensibility. A prototype version of the DRIVE framework has been implemented and the complete framework will be available to the community.