Automated modeling and emulation of interconnect designs for many-core chip multiprocessors

Simulation of new multi- and many-core systems is becoming an increasingly large bottleneck in the design process. This paper presents the ACME design automation tool flow that facilitates the hardware emulation of newly proposed large multi-core interconnection networks on FPGAs to mitigate the slowdowns of single threaded event driven simulation. The tool is aimed at computer and network architects who have knowledge of digital design but may not be comfortable with hardware description languages and synthesis flows. ACME uses a graphical entry that allows a mix of hardware components with software algorithms written in C, each with a user defined latency and throughput in terms of system cycles. ACME automatically generates a cycle accurate hardware emulator as a Xilinx Platform Studio project, which integrates synthesized hardware blocks with embedded soft-core processors that execute the C code. Our results demonstrate that for 16-core and 64-core cycle accurate packet switching networks, the FPGA-based emulation is faster than Simics-based software simulation by 2.5x and 14.6x, respectively.