Research in any field requires tools that enable the modeling of system characteristics of interest. Such tools, whether analytic, simulative or hardware, must enable the accurate representation of all the aspects of a system that may influence the system's perceived utility.

Software tools (notably, simulators) provide low cost of entry, flexibility, and low turn-around time in investigations, but often abstract away some hardware details, with loss in accuracy and realism. Hardware implementations provide the ultimate proof of concept, but are usually expensive, inflexible, and not always designed to expose all possible system parameters to researchers; they are also often not actively evolved over time as research platforms in their own right.

SFLR is a suite of tools, comprising the Sunflower full-system (embedded microarchitecture, networking, power, battery and analog signal) simulator, a miniature energy-scavenging hardware sensor platform, and a handheld interface device.

The suite is intended to provide a complementary and comprehensive platform for research in micro- and system-architectures for embedded systems, with attention to energy-efficiency, reliability, and ecological impact.

A full-system simulator that models multiprocessors or networks of processors, their power consumption, electrochemical batteries and voltage regulators, failures in computation and networks and analog signals in their environments.

The Sunflower simulator is only a part of a larger suite of free / open source hardware and software utilities developed for the design and exploration of networks of resource-constrained and failure-prone systems. The suite includes hardware platforms ranging from an energy-scavenging embedded system platform, to a 24-processor embedded multiprocessor, and a handheld portable computing device. These hardware platforms may be modeled within the simulation framework, and measurements taken on the platforms may similarly be used to calibrate properties of the simulation.