Title :
VirtualSoC: A Full-System Simulation Environment for Massively Parallel Heterogeneous System-on-Chip
Author :
Bortolotti, Daniele ; Pinto, Claudio ; Marongiu, Andrea ; Ruggiero, Matteo ; Benini, Luca
Author_Institution :
DEI, Univ. of Bologna, Bologna, Italy
Abstract :
Driven by flexibility, performance and cost constraints of demanding modern applications, heterogeneous System-on-Chip (SoC) is the dominant design paradigm in the embedded system computing domain. SoC architecture and heterogeneity clearly provide a wider power/performance scaling, combining high performance and power efficient general-purpose cores along with massively parallel many-core-based accelerators. Besides the complex hardware, generally these kinds of platforms host also an advanced software ecosystem, composed by an operating system, several communication protocol stacks, and various computational demanding user applications. The necessity to efficiently cope with the hugeHW/SW design space provided by this scenario makes clearly full-system simulator one of the most important design tools. We present in this paper a new emulation framework, called Virtual SoC, targeting the full-system simulation of massively parallel heterogeneous SoCs.
Keywords :
Linux; digital simulation; embedded systems; hardware-software codesign; multiprocessing systems; parallel architectures; performance evaluation; system-on-chip; HW-SW design space; VirtualSoC architecture; advanced software ecosystem; communication protocol stacks; dominant design paradigm; embedded system computing domain; full-system simulation; full-system simulation environment; full-system simulator; massively parallel heterogeneous SoC; massively parallel heterogeneous system-on-chip; massively parallel many-core-based accelerators; operating system; performance scaling; power efficient general purpose cores; power scaling; Computational modeling; Computer architecture; Hardware; Linux; Program processors; Synchronization;
Conference_Titel :
Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops & PhD Forum (IPDPSW), 2013 IEEE 27th International
Conference_Location :
Cambridge, MA
Print_ISBN :
978-0-7695-4979-8
DOI :
10.1109/IPDPSW.2013.177