An FPGA-based system offers several advantages for systems research. A design implemented on an FPGA allows for visibility into any aspect of the system while at the same time allowing for high configurability. Any particular signal or bus can be observed or recorded by adding performance-monitoring hardware as desired [Matthews et al. 2010]. For the same level of detail, an FPGA-based system can offer performance gains over purely software-based simulators. Leveraging these advantages, our primary goal is to create a platform for traditional multicore systems research that is highly configurable, can provide sufficient performance to run applications on a modern OS, and provides complete visibility into all the internal interactions within the system.Beyond enabling systems research, wealsosee thiswork as afirst steptoward developing a configurable heterogeneous multicore computing framework to make FPGAs more accessible to software engineers.