Analyzing variable entanglement for parallel simulation of SystemC TLM-2.0 models

Abstract

The SystemC TLM-2.0 standard is widely used in modern electronic system level design for better interoperability and higher simulation speed. However, TLM-2.0 has been identified as an obstacle for parallel SystemC simulation due to the disappearance of channels. Without a containment construct, simulation threads are permitted to directly access data of other modules and that makes it difficult to synchronize such accesses as required by the SystemC execution semantics. In this paper, we propose a compile time approach to statically analyze potential conflicts among threads in SystemC TLM-2.0 loosely- and approximately-timed models. We introduce a new Socket Call Path technique which provides the compiler with socket binding information for precise static analysis. We also propose an algorithm to analyze entangled variable pairs. Experimental results show that our approach is able to support automatically safe parallel simulation of SystemC models with TLM-2.0 Blocking Transport Interface, Direct Memory Interface and Non-blocking Transport Interface, resulting in impressive simulation speeds.