Concurrency emulation and analysis of parallel applications for multi-processor system-on-chip co-design

This paper presents a novel technique for the modeling and the simulation of parallel applications for Multi-Processor Systems-on-Chip (MPSoCs). This technique consists of an application-transparent emulation of OS primitives, including task creation, scheduling, synchronization etc.; this emulation guarantees compatibility with any program compiled against the standard POSIX library, independently of the target OS. This methodology can be used to perform initial HW/SW partitioning and concurrent engineering of a given application, as it allows any software routine to be transparently emulated with SystemC modules. The proposed approach has been verified on a large set of multi-threaded benchmarks, with both POSIX Threads and OpenMP programming styles. Results show that our methodology enables (a) fast simulation of POSIX applications, (b) accurate analysis of multi-threaded applications, and (c) co-design and fast preliminary hardware-software partitioning.