Modeling operation and microarchitecture concurrency for communication architectures with application to retargetable simulation

Xinping Zhu, Wei Qin, Sharad Malik

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

In multiprocessor-based system-on-chips (SOCs), optimizing the communication architecture is often as important as, if not more than, optimizing the computation architecture. While there are mature platforms and techniques for the modeling and evaluation of computation architectures, the same is not true for the communication architectures. A major challenge in modeling the communication architecture is managing the concurrency at multiple levels: at the operation level, multiple communication operations may be active at any time; at the microarchitecture level, several microarchitectural components may be operating in parallel. Further, it is important to be able to clearly specify how the operation-level concurrency maps to the microarchitectural-level concurrency. This paper presents a modeling methodology and a retargetable simulation framework which fill this gap. This framework seeks to facilitate the design space exploration of the communication subsystem through a rigorous modeling approach based on a formal concurrency model, the operation state machine (OSM). Our OSM-based modeling methodology enables the entire system including both the computation and communication architectures to be modeled in a single OSM framework. This allows us to develop a tool set that can synthesize cycle-accurate system simulators for multiprocessing-element SOC prototypes. We show that, by simulation, critical system information such as timing and communication patterns can be obtained and evaluated. Consequently, system-level design choices regarding the communication architecture can be made with high confidence in early stages of design.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article number1661620
Pages (from-to)707-716
Number of pages10
JournalIEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems
Volume14
Issue number7
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 2006

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Software
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

Keywords

  • Bus
  • Design exploration
  • Multiprocessor system
  • On-chip communication architecture (OCA)
  • Packet-switching network
  • Retargetable simulation
  • Simulator synthesis

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Modeling operation and microarchitecture concurrency for communication architectures with application to retargetable simulation'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this