Advanced Computer Architecture Laboratory
You must have at least Sun's Java version 1.4.2. This version normally includes the javax.swing and java.awt package sets. Other implementations of Java should work as long as they implement these package sets.
Try opening a command line, cd'ing to the directory containing quilt.jar, and then running java -jar quilt.jar. Hopefully there should be a useful error message. Note that in Windows, the program 'javaw' is the non-console version of Java. However, certain Windows versions have a bug that cause them to choke even when the Windows file associations are set up correctly. (On systems where this occurs, I have had the best luck with the bug fix released by Oracle for this problem. Their Java is free for downloaded via the "Oracle Technology Network.") Once you have got the command line to work, you should be able to set up a file association for JAR files in your operating system, so that you can just double-click in the future.
No! We have tried to make it a standalone tool. However, it can also create floorplan coordinates used by the HotSpot thermal modeling infrastructure.
You must download version 2.0 or compatible from University of Virginia, and uncompress it into a folder called HotSpot-2.0 (the default). You must compile sim-template. On UNIX or Cygwin, just type make sim-template inside the HotSpot directory. If you want to compile HotSpot using Microsoft Visual C++, the compiler will choke on two easy problems. (You will need to change strcasecmp to stricmp and you will need to define M_PI to be 3.1415926. Also, rename the output file to be sim-template.exe.)
If you want to go beyond using the default power trace file, gcc.t, you will want to learn how to use HotSpot. QUILT takes care of producing a floorplan (.flp) file. It also takes care of reading in the output from HotSpot and displaying it. It is your responsibily to produce new power consumption numbers and put them into gcc.t or whatever file you have sim-template set up to read. You will need to do this if you have added new functional units. I highly recommend that you learn how to use HotSpot. We do make HotSpot easier to use, but we don't do all the tasks for you.
QUILT should be extremely portable. It is written in Java, and we are not aware of any specific operating system dependencies. Our testing has only been on MS Windows 2000, Sun SPARC Solaris and Gentoo/Fedora Linux systems. We certainly welcome reports of successful execution for other architectures and operating systems, and any patches that may be needed.
Yes. Simply specify your own floorplan file with any floorplan and granularity you want, or create a new floorplan from the GUI. A sample floorplan is provided that is loosely modeled after a 0.13 micron Alpha 21364.
The tool allows you to model any floorplan you like, simply specify a floorplan with a separate block for each sub-component. If you are using HotSpot, the power simulator should then provide power numbers for these individual sub-blocks.