UI/UX for simulator-based models

[Franchie]

Some of the models, such as those planned for the Arm part of the engagement, rely on a simulator model rather than an FPGA instance. In the interests of planning what is needed from our end, I wanted to see how my working assumptions align with your vision of how this is going to work in practice.

As I see it;

• The portal and deployment interface remain the same in this case.
• A researcher uses that portal and selects the appropriate option for this particular engagement.
• A brief EULA is presented and accepted by the researcher.
• A linux-based host (Debian?) is provisioned with the relevant binaries provided by Arm, alongside pre-installed standard shared libraries, possible documentation and example programs, etc.
• The researcher is granted direct shell access to that instance, via ssh or a web interface.
• The researcher can directly run the model, compiler, and debugging tools, as well as write custom code that will be run on the model.

The key here being that Arm design the tools to operate via commandline, and the provided portal takes care of host provisioning and giving researchers access to these within a known and controlled environment so that everything "just works" from an end user perspective.

Does this align with your current vision?

[kiniry]

This aligns with my vision. You are welcome to specify the nature of the EC2 host instance that is necessary to run the simulator model. We will need to coordinate with Synack and Five Talents wrt the AMI setup and network routing to ensure that packets get to/from only that host instance.

[kiniry]

As I understand it, you will be providing your own OS/application stack on top of the simulated model. While it may take something conceptually from our FETT Target stack specification, there is no technical dependency between our work on FETT-FreeRTOS or FETT-UNIX and your Target software stack. CC @rtadros-Galois

[Franchie]

That's great, thanks for confirming! Yes, we will be providing everything needed on top of the base OS. Our OS/application stack will be either bare metal or a simple FreeRTOS-based setup, since that is what is most interesting to us right now, but indeed there is no technical dependency there.

[kiniry]

Understood; that aligns with Hugo’s earlier characterization, so I’m unsurprised. Thanks!

[mattlebeau-galois]

Booked discussion 1st June w/Hugo and Francois to dive into particulars of implementation and integration to FETT-Portal and will capture items agreed here after the meeting.