SmartBricks: A Visual Environment to Design and Explore Novel Custom Domain-Specific Architectures

Custom domain-specific architectures are very promising for creating designs that are highly optimized to the needs of a particular application domain. However, it is extremely difficult to find optimal tradeoffs in designing a new architecture, or even to fully understand the design space. Therefore, there is a great need to develop an optimum design framework that allows designers to explore the design space efficiently and identify efficient architectures quickly for an application domain. In this paper, we describe SmartBricks, a highly visual design environment that we have developed for designing and exploring custom domain-specific architectures quickly and efficiently. This game-like design environment will be accessible to a broad community so that even non-engineers and non-scientists can contribute to building and exploring out-of-the-box architectural designs.