Table of Contents

  1. Overview
  2. What are FireSim and Chipyard?
  3. Tutorial Schedule
  4. Attendee Logistics/Requirements
  5. Remote attendees
  6. Registration
  7. Sponsors

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!

Sponsors

Thanks to the following sponsors for their generous support in running this tutorial:

Amazon Web Services Logo Xilinx Logo