About¶
Sigil2 comes from Drexel University’s VLSI & Architecture Lab, headed by Dr. Baris Taskin and in collaboration with Tufts University’s Dr. Mark Hempstead.
The goal of Sigil2 is modular application analysis. It was formed from the need to support multiple projects that study application traces, aimed at data-driven architecture design. This has included early hardware accelerator co-design [SIGIL], as well as uncore design space exploration with multi-threaded workloads [SYNCHROTRACE] [UNCORERPD]. Sigil2 is not interested in instrumenting the behavior of an application, but instead aims to classify events in the application and present those events for further analysis. In this way, Sigil2 does not require that each researcher have an in depth understanding of the binary instrumentation tools.
Why call it Sigil2?¶
The initial incarnation of Sigil was developed by Dr. Siddharth Nilakantan for his research into software-hardware co-design [SIGIL]. He named it after Sigil, a city in Planescape: Torment. He also pronounced it “sih-gul”. The current maintainer and developer of Sigil2, Michael Lui, has kept the name and pronunciation for historical purposes. However, all of the underlying code and infrastructure has been rewritten and enhanced.