Welcome to Noxim, the Network-on-Chip Simulator developed at the University of Catania (Italy). The Noxim simulator is developed using SystemC, a system description language based on C++, and it can be downloaded under GPL license terms.
If you use Noxim in your research, we would appreciate the following citation in any publications to which it has contributed:
Vincenzo Catania, Andrea Mineo, Salvatore Monteleone, Maurizio Palesi, and Davide Patti. 2016. Cycle-Accurate Network on Chip Simulation with Noxim. ACM Trans. Model. Comput. Simul. 27, 1, Article 4 (August 2016), 25 pages. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/2953878
[April 2017] Noxim tutorial slides from lecture given at "Advanced Computer Architectures" (ELEC3219 - University of Southampton)
[June 2015] Massively improved version of Noxim. Major changes include:
- Wireless transmission support
- Hub connections for eterogeneous topologies
- YAML configuration file for all features/parameters
- Totally rewritten power model to support fine-grained estimation
- Modular plugin-like addition of Routing/Selection strategies
- Optional accurate logs for deep debugging (see DEBUG in Makefile)
If you are working on Ubuntu, you can install noxim and all the dependencies with the following command: (be sure of copying the entire line, i.e., ending with "ubuntu.sh)
bash <(wget -qO- --no-check-certificate https://raw.githubusercontent.com/davidepatti/noxim/master/other/setup/ubuntu.sh)
Or, to get just the latest master sources, you can run:
git clone https://github.com/davidepatti/noxim.git
For further information please refer to the following files contained in the "doc" directory:
- INSTALL.txt: instructions to install the tool
- MANUAL.txt: explanation of the arguments that can be passed to the simulator
- AUTHORS.txt: authors of the tool
- LICENSE.txt: license under which you are allowed to use the source files
Noxim has a command line interface for defining several parameters of a NoC. In particular the user can customize the network size, buffer size, packet size distribution, routing algorithm, selection strategy, packet injection rate, traffic time distribution, traffic pattern, hot-spot traffic distribution.
The simulator allows NoC evaluation in terms of throughput, delay and power consumption. This information is delivered to the user both in terms of average and per-communication results.
In detail, the user is allowed to collect different evaluation metrics including the total number of received packets/flits, global average throughput, max/min global delay, total energy consumption, per-communications delay/throughput/energy etc.
The Noxim simulator is shipped along with Noxim Explorer, a tool useful during the design space exploration phase. Infact, Noxim Explorer executes many simulations using Noxim in order to explore the design space, and modifying the configuration parameters for each simulation. Noxim Explorer will create new configuration parameters for you, or complete the exploration according to the information read from a script (known as exploration script or space file).