Virtual synchronization for fast distributed cosimulation of dataflow task graphs

Fast distributed cosimulation is a challenging problem for the embedded system design. The main theme of this paper is to increase simulation speed by reducing the frequency of inter-simulator communications, reducing the active duration of simulators and utilizing the parallelism of component simulators, which is accomplished by combining event-driven and data-driven simulation methods. The proposed technique is applicable when the simulated tasks follow dataflow execution semantics. Experimental results show that the proposed technique can boost the cosimulation speed significantly compared with the previous conservative approaches.