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.

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[SIGIL]

(1, 2) S. Nilakantan and M. Hempstead, “Platform-independent analysis of function-level communication in workloads”, 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), pp. 196 - 206, 2013.

[SYNCHROTRACE]

S. Nilakantan, K. Sangaiah, A. More, G. Salvadory, B. Taskin and M. Hempstead, “Synchrotrace: synchronization-aware architecture-agnostic traces for light-weight multicore simulation”, 2015 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), pp. 278 - 287, 2015.

[UNCORERPD]

K. Sangaiah, M. Hempstead and B. Taskin, “Uncore RPD: Rapid design space exploration of the uncore via regression modeling”, 2015 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD), pp. 365 - 372, 2015.