Back to the Rapide home page.
The model also serves as a starting point for several other related projects. For example, it will be used as a starting point for constructing a constraint-based model of the instruction set architecture, in order to develop a tool for automatic verification of implementations. Another research topic that is being explored is modifying the original model in order to create several implementation-specific models for performance analysis.
This report presents an approach to creating an executable standard for the SPARC-V9 instruction set architecture using Rapide-1.0, a language for modeling and prototyping distributed systems. It describes the desired characteristics of a formal specification of the architecture and shows how Rapide can be used to build a model with these characteristics. This is followed by the description of a simple prototype of the proposed model, and a discussion of the issues involved in building and testing the complete specification (with emphasis on some Rapide-specific features such as constraints, causality and mapping). The report concludes with a brief evaluation of the proposed model and suggestions on future areas of research.