SimOS

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SimOS was a full system simulator, developed in the Stanford University in the late nineties in the research group of Mendel Rosenblum. [1] It was enabled to run IRIX 5.3 on MIPS, and Unix variants on Alpha. [2]

Stanford University Private research university in Stanford, California

Leland Stanford Junior University is a private research university in Stanford, California. Stanford is known for its academic achievements, wealth, and selectivity; it ranks as one of the world's top universities.

Mendel Rosenblum American academic

Mendel Rosenblum is a professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and one of the co-founders of VMware.

IRIX operating system

IRIX is a discontinued operating system developed by Silicon Graphics (SGI) to run on the company's proprietary MIPS workstations and servers. It is a variety of UNIX System V with BSD extensions. In IRIX, SGI originated the XFS file system and the universally adopted industry-standard OpenGL graphics system.

Contents

Derivatives

SimOS-PPC

SimOS-PPC was forked from the original SimOS as IBM's internal project, running a modified AIX kernel and userland in an emulator, developed by Tom Keller and his team in the Austin lab of IBM. [3] IBM used SimOS to facilitate development of new systems. The software used in this project is now publicly available for download for AIX 4.3 licensees. [4]

IBM American multinational technology and consulting corporation

International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational information technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, with operations in over 170 countries. The company began in 1911, founded in Endicott, New York, as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company (CTR) and was renamed "International Business Machines" in 1924. IBM is incorporated in New York.

Linux/SimOS

Linux/SimOS was "...a Linux operating system port to SimOS, which is a complete machine simulator from Stanford. The motivation for Linux/SimOS is to alleviate the limitations of SimOS, which only supports proprietary operating systems." [5] [6]

SimBCM

SimBCM is an open source full system simulator based on SimOS. It simulates BCM1250, a dual-core MIPS64 SOC of Broadcom. The entire source code of SimBCM is distributed under GPL. [7] It is capable of running the Linux kernel or the NICTA::Pistachio L4 microkernel.

NICTA Australian government organisation dedicated to ICT research

NICTA was Australia's Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Research Centre of Excellence. The term "Centre of Excellence" is common marketing terminology used by some Australian government organisations for titles of science research groups. NICTA's role was to pursue potentially economically significant ICT related research for the Australian economy.

Similar products

Simics

The currently available commercial product, Virtutech Simics was derived from the work of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science, and was originally developed to run a full system simulation of Solaris on SPARC platform. [8] Simics was used by IBM to help develop AIX 6.1 on a simulation of the POWER6 hardware. [9] [10]

Virtutech was founded in 1998 as a spin-off from the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), in Stockholm, Sweden. In 2004, the headquarters was moved to San Jose, California, USA. The Stockholm site remains the company's R&D center. The company's main product is Simics software, used by teams of software developers to simulate computer systems. This facilitates the development, testing, and debugging of embedded software that runs devices such as high-end servers, network hardware, aerospace/military vehicles, and automobiles. Virtutech markets products that allow embedded software developers to create virtual models of hardware using an ordinary desktop computer, run specified sets of tests, and walk the programs through each step of execution, both forwards and backwards. See the Simics Wikipedia article for more on the product.

Simics is a full-system simulator used to run unchanged production binaries of the target hardware at high-performance speeds. Simics was originally developed by the Swedish Institute of Computer Science (SICS), and then spun off to Virtutech for commercial development in 1998. Virtutech was acquired by Intel in 2010 and Simics is now marketed through Intel's subsidiary Wind River Systems.

POWER6

The POWER6 is a microprocessor developed by IBM that implemented the Power ISA v.2.03. When it became available in systems in 2007, it succeeded the POWER5+ as IBM's flagship Power microprocessor. It is claimed to be part of the eCLipz project, said to have a goal of converging IBM's server hardware where practical.

RSIM

RSIM was the "Rice Simulator for ILP Multiprocessors", developed at the Rice University in the late 1990s. It was able to run on Solaris, IRIX and HP-UX. The simulator is available under the University of Illinois/NCSA open source license agreement. The development is finished. [11]

M5

Developed at the University of Michigan, M5 simulates Alpha and SPARC hardware, with support for other architectures in progress. [12]

See also

Notes and references

  1. ↑ "VMware Leadership". Vmware.com. Retrieved 2011-12-16.
  2. ↑ "SimOS project page at Stanford". Archived from the original on August 24, 2005. Retrieved 2014-07-24.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
  3. ↑ SimOS–PPC - Full System Simulation of PowerPC Architecture (Tom Keller, 1999)
  4. ↑ IBM Austin Research Laboratory - SimOS-PPC Software Archive
  5. ↑ Linux/SimOS - A Simulation Environment for Evaluating High-Speed Communication AeSystems
  6. ↑ Linux MIPS emulators - SimOS
  7. ↑ SimBCM project page
  8. ↑ Simics
  9. ↑ Virtutech Simics Optimizes Product Development of System P Server Product Line
  10. ↑ Interview with Virtutech CEO (mention of POWER6 development)
  11. ↑ The RSIM project
  12. ↑ The M5 Simulator System

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