Multi-threaded Simics SystemC Virtual Platform

The functional simulator Simics provides a co-simulation integration path with a SystemC simulation environment to create Virtual Platforms. With increasing complexity of the SystemC models, this platform suffers from performance degradation due to the single threaded nature of the integrated Virtual Platform. In this paper, we present a multi-threaded Simics SystemC platform solution that significantly improves performance over the existing single threaded solution. The two schedulers run independently, only communicating in a thread safe manner through a message interface. Simics based logging and check-pointing are preserved within SystemC and tied to the corresponding Simics´ APIs for a seamless experience. The solution also scales to multiple SystemC models within the platform, each running its own thread with an instantiation of the SystemC kernel. A second multi-cell solution is proposed providing comparable performance with the multi-thread solution, but reducing the burden of integration on the SystemC model. Empirical data is presented showing performance gains over the legacy single threaded solution.