A new parallel SystemC kernel leveraging manycore architectures

Abstract : The complexity of system-level modeling is continuously increasing. Electronic System Level (ESL) design requires fast simulation techniques to control future SoC development cost and time-to-market. However, SystemC simulations are sequential and then limited by single-thread performance. In this paper, we present a new parallel SystemC kernel that efficiently leverages the multiple cores of a host machine, reaching high simulation performance without relaxing accuracy. It supports atomic parallel evaluation of SystemC processes and repeatable execution for HW/SW debugging. This new kernel is fully compliant with existing standards and easy to integrate in any existing SystemC model. Evaluations show a maximum acceleration of 34× compared to Accellera SystemC on a 64-core AMD Opteron machine.