ΣVP: Host-GPU multiplexing for efficient simulation of multiple embedded GPUs on virtual platforms

Despite their proliferation across many embedded platforms, GPUs present still many challenges to embedded-system designers. In particular, GPU-optimized software actually slows down the execution of embedded applications on system simulators. This problem is worse for concurrent simulations of multiple instances of embedded devices equipped with GPUs. To address this challenge, we present ΣVP, a framework to accelerate concurrent simulations of multiple virtual platforms by leveraging the physical GPUs present on the host machine. ΣVP multiplexes the host GPUs to speed up the concurrent simulations without requiring any change to the original GPU-optimized application code. With ΣVP, GPU applications run more than 600 times faster than GPU-software emulation on virtual platforms. We also propose Kernel Interleaving and Kernel Coalescing, two techniques that further speed up the simulation by one order of magnitude. Finally, we show how ΣVP supports simulation-based functional validation and performance/power estimation.