PUNCH: Web Portal for Running Tools

Computer architecture educators and researchers increasingly depend on the use of sophisticated software tools to investigate and evaluate designs of computer systems and their components. Currently, computer architecture CAD (computer-aided design) in universities relies on locally built tools or on public-domain software developed by small research groups. Such groups have limited resources and must focus on specific needs, making it hard to share and leverage tool development. Similarly, potential users of available tools often fail to realize that such tools exist or do not have access to the resources needed to run them. Given the often-large investment in time and hardware needed to create and use tools, this reality has lead to considerable duplication of efforts, waste of resources, and delays in research work. Another unique need of the computer architecture community arises in the large body of “advanced” computer architecture CAD tools being developed to explore new concepts. These tools tend to be narrow in scope and computationally intensive. They often remain research artifacts for a long period of time before (if ever) becoming robust and portable software with friendly interfaces. There is much to be gained by providing a mechanism to share such leading-edge experimental tools and the necessary resources among computer architecture researchers and educators. Active software portals such as PUNCH (Purdue University Network Computing Hubs) allow users to access and run unmodified software tools on distributed resources via standard Web browsers. Tools do not have to be written in any particular language, and access to source or object code is not required. PUNCH’s infrastructure is geographically distributed in a manner that is transparent to users. Users can run tools in the lab or at home. They can define and run simulations, and view the text and graphical output via their Web browsers. PUNCH consists of multiple, disciplinespecific “hubs.” Of the hubs currently available on PUNCH, one is dedicated to computer architecture. It includes a growing number of independently developed tools for computer architecture research and education (for example, CacheSim5, DLX-View, Proteus, RSIM, Shade). Other hubs contain tools for parallel programming, computational electronics, and VLSI design. These hubs currently provide access to 50 tools from 13 universities and 6 vendors. They serve more than 800 users from within Purdue, across the US, and in Europe. Students in undergraduNirav H. Kapadia Renato J. Figueiredo José A.B. Fortes