Facing Architecture Education Solutions

Problem Description

The architecture course of computer science in colleges and universities has always been characterized by high degree of abstraction, difficulty and difficulty. Due to the lack of supporting experimental means, the student's learning process is very difficult.

At the same time, many domestic colleges and universities in the teaching of the lack of teacher resources, but also for the popularity of this course caused difficulties.

Solution

SmartSimu-EDU architecture teaching experimental platform, is for the computer architecture teaching and development of a graphical tool set. With SmartSimu-EDU, without the need for hardware, students can intuitively and quickly master the core concepts of computer systems.

For various parts of the computer system, such as: processor, memory, hard drives, etc., SmartSimu-EDU comes with a variety of software simulation module. Students can drag and connect these modules quickly into a complete virtual machine and run the program. The behavior of the program, and the real machine is no difference.

In order to understand the differences in the hardware structure, students can also drag and drop the way to replace a part of the virtual computer, run again, and observe the changes in the entire system. The reassembly is in less than a minute, so that in a class time, the students can try the combinations very often. For example: In order to understand the impact of different processor cache on system performance, students can use the size and strategy of different cache to assemble the system, and observe the test program execution time, cache hit rate, access latency and other data The change, thus having an intuitive experience.

Not only that, SmartSimu-EDU itself is a platform, with good scalability. It supports students to develop their own modules to test custom virtual hardware. Just implement three C language functions, students can achieve a cache of their own. No need to write HDL code or debug hardware.

Since the development of virtual hardware only use the C language, learning threshold is very low, which eliminates many of the students interested in the architecture of their own basic knowledge of the concerns, thus expanding the audience of the architecture curriculum. At the same time, their own development of a virtual hardware and observe it in a complete system of behavior, this very sensible process of understanding, greatly improving the learning process of the sense of accomplishment and fun.

Bring value

The SmartSimu-EDU architecture simulates the experimental platform, which adds a convenient, intuitive, flexible and memorable experience for the architectural learning process in a graphical way. We believe that this platform will help a lot of interested students to better entry and further study, and in the near future, in the field of architecture has been accomplished for our high-tech industry to make outstanding contributions.