Fused: Full-System Simulation of Energy-Driven Computers

Fused: Full-System Simulation of Energy-Driven Computers

Fused is a full-system simulator for modelling energy-driven computers. To accurately model the interplay between energy-availability, power consumption, and execution; Fused models energy and execution in a closed feedback loop.

The power model is based on recording high-level events (memory accesses, peripheral operations etc.) and states (modules on/off, peripheral operation modes etc.), and computing the instantaneous power consumption at runtime. Simultaneously, external circuitry such as e.g. energy storage, power supply and power management is modelled. The power consumption, power supply, and energy-availability, is then used to calculate the supply voltage, which in turn is monitored by the modeled microcontroller. In this way, we can model an embedded system through power cycles.

Some key features of Fused include:

  • Simulates power consumption and power supply in a closed feedback loop;
  • Hosts a GDB server to interface with most software development environments;
  • Enables debugging functionality across power cycles, and the ability to freeze and step through the dynamic power/energy state in lockstep with execution;
  • Executes unmodified binaries to be deployed on real hardware;
  • Allows modelling of complex external circuitry through SystemC-AMS;

Fused will be presented at the 2020 ISPASS conference. Please cite the following paper when using Fused in your research:

Sivert T. Sliper, William Wang, Nikos Nikoleris, Alex S. Weddell, Geoff V. Merrett, “Fused: Closed-loop Performance and Energy Simulation of Embedded Systems”, 2020 International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), Boston, MA, USA, 2020.

The paper is available at IEEEXplore, and the supporting dataset at DOI 10.5258/SOTON/D1200.

A paper on Fused was recently presented at ISPASS 2020; watch a video of the presentation below:

Fused is hosted on Github.

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