AWS EC2 F2 Getting Started Guide

The getting started guides that follow this page will guide you through the complete flow for getting an example Chipyard-based SoC FireSim simulation up and running using AWS EC2 F2. At the end of this guide, you’ll have a simulation that simulates a single quad-core Rocket Chip-based node with a 4 MB last level cache, 16 GB DDR3, and no NIC. After this, you can continue to a guide that shows you how to simulate a globally-cycle-accurate cluster-scale FireSim simulation. The final guide will show you how to build your own FPGA images with customized hardware. After you complete these guides, you can look at the “Advanced Docs” in the sidebar to the left.

Make sure you have run/done the steps listed in AWS EC2 F2 System Setup before running this guide.

Here’s a high-level outline of what we’ll be doing in our AWS EC2 F2 getting started guides:

  1. Setting up the FireSim repo: Cloning the repository needed for this guide.

  2. Single-node simulation guide: This guide walks you through the process of running one simulation on a Run Farm consisting of a single f2.6xlarge, using Chipyard’s pre-built public AGFIs.

  3. Cluster simulation guide: This guide walks you through the process of running an 8-node cluster simulation on a Run Farm consisting of one f1.16xlarge, using Chipyard’s pre-built public AGFIs and switch models.

  4. Building your own hardware designs guide (Chisel to FPGA Image): This guide walks you through the full process of taking Rocket Chip RTL and any custom RTL plugged into Rocket Chip and producing a FireSim AGFI to plug into your simulations. This automatically runs Chisel elaboration, FAME-1 Transformation, and the Vivado FPGA flow.

Generally speaking, you only need to follow step 4 if you’re modifying Chisel RTL or changing non-runtime configurable hardware parameters.

Note

This section uses ${CY_DIR} and ${FS_DIR} to refer to the Chipyard and FireSim directories. These are set when sourcing the Chipyard and FireSim environments.