Overview

We’re running a hands-on full-day tutorial on FireSim and Chipyard at ISCA 2022!

We’ll be providing access to AWS EC2 F1 instances to in-person attendees free-of-charge to interactively follow the tutorial, thanks to the generosity of AWS and Xilinx! Remote attendees, please see the remote attendees section below.

Attendees will be able to customize an industry and silicon-proven RISC-V microprocessor design, run their own high-performance FPGA-accelerated simulations of their design in the cloud, and learn how to push their design to silicon, guided by the FireSim and Chipyard developers. See the tentative schedule below for more details.

What are FireSim and Chipyard?

Chipyard is a one-stop shop for generating complex RISC-V SoCs, including in-order and out-of-order processors, uncore components, vector co-processors, and other kinds of accelerators. Users can customize any component of the system and push it through automated ASIC flows (e.g. Hammer), software simulation (e.g. Verilator and VCS), and FPGA-accelerated simulation flows (e.g. FireSim) to enable agile end-to-end computer architecture research with a single re-usable toolchain.

FireSim is an open-source FPGA-accelerated simulation framework that can simulate designs built in Chipyard and deploy them to cloud FPGAs, running complex software stacks (e.g. Linux + applications) at 100s of MHz. FireSim simulations exactly and deterministically model Chipyard designs, matching cycle-by-cycle bit-by-bit behavior of the design as if it were taped out in silicon. I/Os like DRAM, UART, and Ethernet are also modeled cycle-accurately, allowing users to model complex systems, including large clusters, beyond the capabilities of test-chips.

Together, Chipyard and FireSim bridge the gap between open-hardware and architecture research, automating many common tasks of architecture and VLSI researchers in a single, easy-to-use platform.

Tutorial Schedule

Time (EDT)	Session Name	Speaker	Slides
8:30am	Introduction/Overview, Amazon EC2 Instance Setup, Logistics	Sagar Karandikar	PDF
9:00am	Chipyard Basics	Jerry Zhao	PDF
9:30am	Building Custom RISC-V SoCs in Chipyard	Jerry Zhao	PDF
10:30am	Coffee Break
11:00am	Hammer VLSI Flow	Nayiri Krzysztofowicz	PDF
11:30pm	FPGA Prototyping	Nayiri Krzysztofowicz	PDF
12:00pm	Lunch
1:30pm	FireSim Introduction	Sagar Karandikar	PDF
2:00pm	Building Hardware Designs in FireSim	Sagar Karandikar	PDF
2:30pm	Coffee Break
3:00pm	Building Software Workloads with FireMarshal	Albert Ou	PDF
3:30pm	Running a FireSim Simulation: Password Strength Checking on a RISC-V SoC with SHA-3 Accelerators and Linux	Albert Ou	PDF
4:00pm	Debugging and Profiling FireSim-Simulated Designs	Abraham Gonzalez	PDF
4:40pm	FireSim Local (On-Prem) FPGA and Distributed Metasimulation Support	Abraham Gonzalez	PDF
4:55pm	Conclusion	Sagar Karandikar	PDF
5:00pm	End of Tutorial

Attendee Logistics/Requirements

No prior experience with FireSim/Chipyard/RISC-V/Chisel is necessary. To follow along with the tutorial on the EC2 instances we provide (in-person attendees only), users will need to bring a laptop with an ssh client installed. Users may want to consider installing mosh (https://mosh.org/), a reliable ssh-client replacement. Our EC2 instances will also support connecting via mosh.

Remote attendees

Tentatively, we will also support remote attendees who are following along using their own AWS accounts. We will provide more information on this soon.

Of course, remote attendees are always free to follow along non-interactively (i.e. just watching the sessions).

Registration

To attend the tutorial (in-person or virtually), you must register for ISCA 2022.

Stay tuned!

We will continue to update this page as the tutorial is finalized. Join the FireSim mailing list and follow the FireSim Twitter account to stay up-to-date as we finalize the tutorial!

Tutorial on FireSim and Chipyard at ISCA 2022