The data flow simulator, a tool for system simulation

Westinghouse has developed a unique and innovative tool, the data flow simulator (DFS), that directly links software design to a hardware/operation system model that provides detailed information on the execution of the input software application and determines the system performance statistics, including processor utilization, bus utilization, memory utilization, critical transmission paths, operating system overhead and overall throughput for each application scenario that is input to the model. The DFS has been used on the AWACS radar system improvement program. Simulation has provided critical feedback to the software engineers as a result of DFS outputs that showed the impact of bus conflicts on processor utilization, bottlenecks in the design, the impact of the software to hardware mapping on overall throughput, and the impact of various Ada tasking schemes on system performance