Kite is an architecture simulator that models a five-stage pipeline of RISC-V instruction set. The initial version of Kite was developed in 2019 for educational purposes as a part of EEE3530 Computer Architecture. Kite is progressively being updated to support EEE6501 Advanced Computer Architecture in the future. Kite implements the five-stage pipeline model described in Computer Organization and Design, RISC-V Edition: The Hardware and Software Interface by D. Patterson and J. Hennessey (Link to Amazon). The objective of Kite is to provide students with an easy-to-use simulation framework and precise timing model as described in the book. It supports most of the basic instructions introduced in the book such as add, slli, ld, sd, beq instructions. Users can easily compose RISC-V assembly programs and execute them through the provided pipeline model for entry-level architectural studies. The pipeline model in Kite offers several basic functionalities including instruction dependency check (i.e., data hazards), pipeline stalls, data forwarding or bypassing (optional), branch predictions (optional), data cache structures, etc.

The five-stage pipeline model in Kite is implemented in C++. Its objective is to help users experience entry-level architecture simulations with a simple, easy-to-use framework. If students join the computer architecture world in their careers (either product development or research), they will certainly have to use some architecture simulators for work. Most architecture simulators are written in C/C++ since this programming language is the most suitable one to interface between computer hardware and software.

 

Prerequisite, Download, and Build
The simple implementation of Kite makes it easy to install. It requires only a g++ compiler to build and does not depend on other libraries or external tools to run. It has been validated in Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial), 18.04 (Bionic Beaver), 20.04 (Focal Fossa), and Mac OS 10.14 (Mojave), 10.15 (Catalina), 11 (Big Sur), 12 (Monterey). The latest release of Kite is v1.9 (as of June, 2022). To obtain a copy of Kite v1.9, use the following command in a terminal.

$ git clone --branch v1.9 https://github.com/yonsei-icsl/kite

Try building and executing an example code with the following commands.

$ cd kite/
$ make -j
$ ./kite program_code

 

Documentation
For more detailed information, refer to the documentation available at doc/kite.pdf. Please, use the following to reference our work.

@misc{song_kite2019,
    author       = {W. Song},
    title        = {{Kite: An Architecture Simulator for RISC-V Instruction Set}},
    howpublished = {Yonsei University},
    month        = {May},
    year         = {2019},
    note         = {[Online], Available: \url{https://casl.yonsei.ac.kr/kite}},
}