Accelerating SystemC simulations using GPUs

Abstract

Recent developments in graphics processing unit (GPU) technology has invigorated an interest in using GPUs for accelerating the simulation of SystemC models. SystemC is extensively used for design space exploration, and early performance analysis of hardware systems. SystemC's reference implementation of the simulation kernel supports a single-threaded simulation kernel. However, modern computing platforms offer substantially more compute power by means of multiple central processing units, and multiple co-processors such as GPUs. This has peaked an interest in parallelizing SystemC simulations. Of these, several efforts focus on utilizing the massive parallelism offered by GPUs as an alternate computing platform. In this paper, we present a summary of these recent research efforts that propose using GPUs for accelerating SystemC simulation.