Approximate time functional simulation of resource-aware programming concepts for heterogeneous MPSoCs

The design and the programming of heterogeneous future MPSoCs including thousands of processor cores is a hard challenge. Means are necessary to program and simulate the dynamic behavior of such systems in order to dimension the hardware design and to verify the software functionality as well as performance goals. Cycle-accurate simulation of multiple parallel applications simultaneously running on different cores of the architecture would be much too slow and is not the desired level of detail. In this paper, we therefore present a novel high-level simulation approach which tackles the complexity and the heterogeneity of such systems and enables the investigation of a new computing paradigm called invasive computing. Here, the workload and its distribution are not known at compile-time but are highly dynamic and have to be adapted to the status (load, temperature, etc.) of the underlying architecture at run-time. We propose an approach for the modeling of tiled MPSoC architectures and the simulation of resource-aware programming concepts on these. This approach delivers important timing information about the parallel execution and also is taking into account the computational properties of possibly different types of cores.