Array Processing enviRONment (APRON)
APRON is a SIMD processor architecture simulation environment from David Barr who is in Piotr Dudek's lab at University of Manchester.. It runs under windows XP or VISTA. We will be using an older version of the program (APRON 0.7.1) that can be downloaded from here. Local versions of the software can also be found here (local). You will also need to install the Crimson editor from here (local). APRON is described in this paper:
Barr and Dudek. APRON: A Cellular Processor Array Simulation and Hardware Design Tool. EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing (2009) vol. 2009 pp. 1-10 (pdf).
Installation instructions (from David Barr's Readme.txt file that comes with the download)
0) Download and install Visual C++ 2008 Runtime Library (link to download)
1) Download and Install Crimson Editor ver 3.7.2 (http://www.crimsoneditor.com) (link to download)
2) Download and unzip APRON0.7.1.zip. In the root directory of the unzipped file you will find the Redme.txt and also some auxiliary files that are used by the Crimson Editor.
3) Copy 'apron.cmd' into '[Crimson Editor]\tools' folder
4) Copy 'apron.key' into '[Crimson Editor]\spec' folder
5) Copy 'apron.spc' into '[Crimson Editor]\spec' folder
6) Copy 'extension.aps' into '[Crimson Editor]\link' folder
7) Copy the APRON directory and its contents from the downloaded zip file to "C:\APRON". This is the preferred location, if you must install elsewhere, then make sure you edit the Crimson Editor tool files accordingly.
8) Open Crimson Editor and Goto "Tools -> Conf. User Tools". Here you can see the tools 'APRON Build' and 'APRON Run' By selecting these tools, you can see if they link to the correct APRON install location ('C:\APRON' by default). If you did not install APRON here then change the location accordingly. If you make changes, ensure you save them. Install is (hopefully!) complete.
9) You can now use CTRL+1 to build the APRON simulation, and CTRL+2 to execute it instead of accessing the commands from the Tools menu.
10) It may be useful to associate ".aps" files with Crimson Editor ("cedt.exe"), and ".apron" with 'ApronSim.exe'. Just double clicking on the files in explorer should initiate this process, if they are not already assigned to an executable.
11) You can set the compiler verbosity by specifying a number 0, 1, 2, 3