OpenPiton at 5: A Nexus for Open and Agile Hardware Design

For five years, OpenPiton has provided hardware designs, build and verification scripts, and other infrastructure to enable efficient, detailed research into manycores and systems-on-chip. It enables open-source hardware development through its open design and support of a plethora of open simulators and CAD tools. OpenPiton was first designed to perform cutting-edge computer architecture research at Princeton University and opening it up to the public has led to thousands of downloads and numerous academic publications spanning many subfields within computing. In this article, we share some of the lessons learned during the development of OpenPiton, provide examples of how OpenPiton has been used to efficiently test novel research ideas, and discuss how OpenPiton has evolved due to its open development and feedback from the open-source community.