Lessons from Implementing a FAST Prototype

Over the past three and a half years, we have been working on defining and developing FPGAAccelerated Simulation Technologies (FAST)[2], [3], [4], [5], a novel methodology that uses FPGAs to build very fast simulators of complex computer systems. We have built a prototype that simulates the x86 ISA, boots Windows XP and Linux and runs unmodified applications at an average of 1.2MIPS, with the expectation of being able to run significantly faster. This talk describes some of the issues that we ran into while building our prototype and how we addressed them. It also describes areas where things worked out right, either due to foresight or blind luck.