HASE: a flexible high performance architecture simulator

HASE is a hierarchical computer architectural design and simulation environment which allows a computer architecture and its implementation to be represented graphically at several different levels of abstraction. Class inheritance is used to factor out common behaviour, for example, producer/consumer synchronisations, queue and statistics functions inherited by the memory, bus and function unit hierarchies. An architecture editor which maintains architectural consistency is used to select, insert and connect objects at abstraction levels relevant to the focus of a simulation experiment. The implementation of a model can be refined using a trace animator to visualise entity scheduling, synchronisation and blocking behaviour and an architecture animator can be used to validate functional correctness. Statistics gathered during a simulation allow performance assessments to be made.<>