Modeling and simulation of complex heterogeneous systems

Given the increasing heterogeneity and complexity of systems being developed, untimed modeling at a system level becomes more and more important for design space exploration and verification, due to its conciseness and speed. After showing inadequacies of SystemC, which is the predominant modeling environment in this area, we propose a paradigm shift from immediate notifications and coroutines in SystemC to Atomic Actions and true parallelism in an extension of Esys.NET. We exploit the introspection and attribute programming to extend the capabilities of the environment and to build the basis for heterogeneous cosimulation. This paper aims to show the main advantages of this paradigm shift, such as (1) the improvement of simulation time by exploiting the capabilities of multicore simulation hosts, (2) the reduction of modeling hazards related to parallelism and resource sharing, and (3) a more efficient design space exploration.