Parallel Simulation of SystemC Loosely-Timed Transaction Level Models

Abstract: Parallelizing the development cycles of hardware and software is becoming the industry’s norm for reducing time to market for electronic devices. In the absence of hardware, software development is based on a virtual platform; a fully functional software model of a system under development, able to execute unmodified code. A Transaction Level Model, expressed with the SystemC TLM 2.0 language, is one of the many possible ways for constructing a virtual platform. Under SystemC’s simulation engine, hardware and software is being co-simulated. However, the sequential nature of the reference implementation of the SystemC’s simulation kernel, is a limiting factor. Poor simulation performance often constrains the scope and depth of the design decisions that can be evaluated. It is the main objective of this thesis’ project to demonstrate the feasibility of parallelizing the co-simulation of hardware and software using Transaction Level Models, outside SystemC’s reference simulation environment. The major obstacle identified is the preservation of causal relations between simulation events. The solution is obtained by using the process synchronization mechanism known as the Chandy/Misra/Bryantt algorithm. To demonstrate our approach and evaluate under which conditions a speedup can be achieved, we use the model of a cache-coherent, symmetric multiprocessor executing a synthetic application. Two versions of the model are used for the comparison; the parallel version, based on the Message Passing Interface 3.0, which incorporates the synchronization algorithm and an equivalent sequential model based on SystemC TLM 2.0. Our results indicate that by adjusting the parameters of the synthetic application, a certain threshold is reached, above which a significant speedup against the sequential SystemC simulation is observed. Although performed manually, the transformation of a SystemC TLM 2.0 model into a parallel MPI application is deemed feasible.