How to Obtain an Academic Simics License

As a result of the recent acquisition of Virtutech by Intel, Simics is now a Wind River product. As such, it is now available as part of the Wind River University program. For details and how to join, please visit: http://www.windriver.com/universities.

Simics Academic Site Licenses: Details

The Simics academic site license is a license-server based floating license system. It allows a practically unlimited number of simultaneous copies of Simics to run on campus computers, including compute clusters, faculty workstations, and student computers. As long as a computer can reach the license server, it can run Simics (we expect the license server to be restricted to only serve licenses to computers on the university network). Thus, a single license server and a single application for a site license should be sufficient for each research group, lab, project, or education program, as shown in the picture below.

Simics Use Away from Computer Labs

The Simics academic site licenses are floating licenses, and are intended to be run from a central server for a department or an entire university. To provide access to Simics for students and faculty away from lab rooms or out of the office, the Simics users need to be able to access this server. This can be over a campus network, university VPN, or other solution. Virtutech obviously requires that the licenses only be accessible from within the bounds of the university network.

Note that due to misuse, Virtutech has been forced to discontinue the personal academic license program. Thus, the only way for students to have access to Simics is to access the university license servers. Keep this in mind when selecting your license server.

Target Machine Models Available

The set of target machine models provided to academic users is a subset of the complete range of models created for Simics. The reason for this is to keep the support cost reasonable for Virtutech, and commercial requirements on the availability on certain models. We have tried to keep the set of machines available broad, to cover both regular PCs, SPARC Servers, and a range of embedded targets. The set of machines will be different in different versions of Simics, due to changes in the model set over time.

In Simics 4.0, the machines available currently are: MIPS-Malta, SPARC32-Leon2, Power Architecture-Freescale MPC8641, ppc-simple, PPC440GP, SPARC64-UltraSparc T1, Serengeti, Sunfire, ARM-TS7200, x86-PC (32 and 64 bit).

Simics Features

Academic Simics licenses include all standard Simics features, like Ethernet networking, real-world connections from the virtual machines, reverse execution, and multithreaded simulation (Simics Accelerator) in Simics 4.0.

Simics Versions Prior to 3.0

Simics versions prior to 3.0 are no longer supported by Virtutech, and we are no longer able to supply licenses for Simics 2.2 and earlier. This means that you will have to migrate old scripts and experiments to more recent Simics versions. In general, it is recommended to keep setups as up-to-date with Simics releases as possible, since the simplifies future upgrades.

Simics Support Forum

Academic licenses are supported at www.simics.net, and in order to grant your researchers and students access to the support forum, they all need to have emails in the domain of the university. We do not accept general email addresses like hotmail, gmail, or similar services as user emails.