Akita: A High Usability Simulation Framework for Computer Architecture
Sabila Al Jannat, Ying Li, Mengyang He, Xuzhong Wang, Huizhi Zhao, Jingxiang Sun, Daoxuan Xu, Enze Xu, Yifan Sun

TL;DR
Akita is a dedicated simulation engine designed to improve usability and productivity in computer architecture research by separating infrastructure from models and supporting efficient, real-time monitoring.
Contribution
It introduces a high-usability simulation framework that simplifies development, enables transparent parallelism, and enhances monitoring, addressing key barriers in architecture simulation.
Findings
Supports real-time monitoring and post-simulation visualization.
Enables transparent multi-core simulation with single-threaded code.
Demonstrated through case studies on DNN and RISC-V CPU simulations.
Abstract
Computer architecture simulation is essential for evaluating new designs without the need for costly tapeout. The community has developed dozens of valuable simulators that have enabled significant architectural advances. However, using and developing simulators remains a major barrier due to ad-hoc component interfaces, strict deployment requirements, the burden of managing performance optimizations like parallelization at the component level, and limited monitoring and visualization capabilities. The root cause of these limitations is the systematic neglect of user and developer experience in favor of technical functionality. We believe that only by separating technical concerns from user and developer experience concerns -- through a dedicated simulation engine decoupled from hardware models -- can the community overcome these fundamental obstacles and enable more productive…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
