Optimizing Temporal Decoupling using Event Relevance

Abstract

Over the last decades, HW/SW systems have grown ever more complex. System simulators, so called virtual platforms, have been an important tool for developing and testing these systems. However, the rise in overall complexity has also impacted the simulators. Complex platforms require fast simulation components and a sophisticated simulation infrastructure to meet today’s performance demands. With the introduction of SystemC TLM2.0, temporal decoupling has become a staple in the arsenal of simulation acceleration techniques. Temporal decoupling yields a significant simulation performance increase at the cost of diminished accuracy. The two prevalent approaches are called static quantum and dynamic quantum. In this work both are analyzed using a state-of-the-art, industrial virtual platform as a case study. While dynamic quantum offers an ideal trade-off between simulation performance and accuracy in a single-core scenario, performance reductions can be observed in multi-core platforms. To address this, a novel performance optimization is proposed, achieving a 14.32% performance gain in our case study while keeping near-perfect accuracy.