Introduction to Giano:
A framework for full-system simulation

by Alessandro Forin, Microsoft Research

Overview:

Giano is a simulation framework for the full-system simulation of arbitrary computer systems, with special emphasis on the hardware-software co-development of system software and Real-Time embedded applications. It allows the simultaneous execution of binary
code on a simulated microprocessor and of Verilog code on a simulated FPGA, within a single target system capable of interacting in
Real-Time with the outside world. The graphical user interface creates the interconnection graph of the user-provided simulation modules in
PlatformXML, an XML-based platform description language.

This tutorial will introduce the Giano simulator with practical examples on how to use the provided system configurations, how to
create new ones, how to create new simulation modules, and how to interface with external components.

Presenter Bio:

Alessandro Forin is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research where he leads a small research group on Embedded Systems, with special emphasis on Invisible and Reconfigurable Computing. He has been at Microsoft Research since 1994, working on operating systems (the set-top box OS for the first interactive TV system, the MMLite RTOS for the Talisman graphic project and Windows for Xbox-1) and networking (the VIA/Infiniband cluster interconnect and the first TCP/IP land-speed record for Windows) before switching to FPGAs. Previously he was on the Faculty at Carnegie-Mellon University and created the first weakly-coherent distributed shared memory system, used for speech recognition. As a co-principal investigator for the Mach OS project (now Apple's Mac OS X) he then worked on shared memory multiprocessors, RISC and 64-bit microprocessors, multiple user-mode OS emulations (Unix, VMS, MS-DOS, MacOS) and user-mode I/O architectures. Alessandro graduated from the University of Padova, Italy with a MS in Electrical Engineering in 1982 and a PhD in Computer Science in 1987. He is Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Texas A&M University since 2005, holds 16 patents.