QFlex | Quick & Flexible Computer Architecture Simulation

State-of-the-art modeling tools for the computer architecture community.
The QFlex project targets quick, accurate, and flexible simulation of computer systems.

Download QFlex

QFlex’s source code is hosted on GitHub: parsa-epfl/qflex
QFlex is available both as a command-line tool (CLI) and as a Docker image, making setup and integration straightforward.
For a quick start, visit the quickstart section.

About QFlex

Computer systems hardware and software designers have traditionally relied on fast emulation and full-system simulation to instrument a design of interest, develop and debug system software, model new hardware components and measure design metrics of interest. Post-Moore platforms in recent years have not only seen a proliferation of accelerators but also the need for system hardware/software co-design to help integrate heterogeneity into the system stack. Effective integration requires open-source tools that enable fast instrumentation of application and system software, full-system models for network and storage controllers, and models of multi-node computer systems. Full-system server instrumentation and modeling requires several orders of magnitude in speed to enable practical turnaround. QFlex is a family of full-system instrumentation tools based on QEMU which currently supports the ARM and RISC-V ISA. QFlex includes a trace-based model to quickly instrument existing QEMU images, and timing models to simulate multi-core CPUs in detail. It includes:

A trace-based model for quickly instrumenting existing QEMU images
Timing models to simulate multicore CPU microarchitecture
With support for multi-node simulation coming soon.

For more details, modules, and citations, see the project documentation and the GitHub repo.

News / Releases

QFlex v2.0 Released

Released March 20, 2020. QFlex continues to support trace-based simulation and timing models. (See release notes on GitHub.)

QFlex v1.0 Released

Released April 1, 2017. QFlex enabled full-system microarchitectural simulation of multicores running unmodified applications. A CloudSuite workload image was provided. (zenodo.org)

We encourage users to watch the GitHub repository and file issues for enhancements or bug fixes.

Flexus (cycle-accurate simulator used in QFlex): parsa-epfl/flexus
libqflex (API between QEMU and Flexus): parsa-epfl/libqflex
EPFL’s EcoCloud page on QFlex: EcoCloud – QFlex

Citation / Licensing & Acknowledgments

QFlex is open source under licenses as described in the GitHub repository.
The project relies on QEMU, Boost, Conan, and other components, each governed by their own licenses.