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AWB is the Asim Architect’s Workbench

AWB is tool for facilitating the modular plug-n-play style construction of software and hybrid software/hardware projects. It was originally written to create software performance models within the Asim performance modeling infrastructure. AWB’s origin as part of Asim is the reason for the many references to Asim in the documentation and tools themselves. AWB has, however, been extended to be a more general tool for constructing a variety of projects where selection of alternative implementations of modules in a plug-n-play manner is advantageous. In specific, AWB now supports hybrid hardware/software designs. The first of these was the HAsim modeling infrastructure, but a variety of other more general designs are currently using AWB.

Installation instructions for AWB

• General system-level installation of AWB
  • Installation using apt on ubuntu
  • Installation from source

• The one time user-level AWB setup instructions

• Some getting started examples:
  • Creating a workspace from the command line or GUI
  • Building and running the example from the command line or GUI
  • Browsing the source code for the example from the command line or GUI
  • Building and running on a real FPGA
  • Running an experiment with multiple models and benchmarks using awb-run

• Tutorials on writing AWB modules
  • Writing an AWB module

• Optimization hints

Terminology

• Workspace
• Configure (a model)
• Repository
• Bundle
• Package
• Model
• Module
• Awb-type
• Uniondir Search Path

Tools

• awb-shell – the command line-based interface to use an AWB workspace
• awb – the GUI-based interface to use an AWB workspace

• apm-edit – the GUI-based interface to create a model

• awb-resolver – command line tool to resolve file names in an AWB workspace

Configuration file formats

• Workspace configuration: awb.config
• Model descrption: .apm file
• Module description: .awb file
• Benchmark description: .cfg file
• Multiple benchmark description: .cfx file

Projects using awb

• Asim
• HAsim
• LEAP

Additional Documentation

An overview of AWB is contained in the 2007 MOBS paper: document:“AWB – The Asim Architect’s Workbench”.

News

• 2009/07/27 – Migrating from hasim_system to the new system module.
• 2009/07/03 – AWB upgrade after split of AWB and Asimcore

Releases

See Releases pages.