Distributed, loosely-synchronized systemC/TLM simulations of many-processor platforms

Today´s virtual prototypes model complex manycore platforms. In application domains such as network processing, they may comprise hundreds of processors, which makes simulation speed the key issue due to the single-threaded execution semantics of SystemC. We propose CoMix, the Concurrent Model Interface, for the distributed simulation of large-scale SystemC models. CoMix provides robust communication between peers, enables their loose synchronization, and manages the overall life cycle. It is an overlay technology neither requiring modified simulators nor depending on a hosts´ communication infrastructure. The CoMix library is small (2k Lines of Code) and easily deployable. We quantify its overhead on synthetic benchmarks and observe reasonable speedups for synthetic benchmarks and a large real-world example, e.g., 3.3X and 4X for a 4-peer simulation.