Name
Title | ||
|---|---|---|
A case of system-level hardware/software co-design and co-verification of a commodity multi-processor system with custom hardware |
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
This paper presents an interesting system-level co-design and co-verification case study for a non-trivial design where multiple high-performing x86 processors and custom hardware were connected through a coherent interconnection fabric. In functional verification of such a system, we used a processor bus functional model (BFM) to combine native software execution with a cycle-accurate interconnect simulator and an HDL simulator. However, we found that significant extensions need to be made to the conventional BFM methodology in order to capture various data-race cases in simulation, which eventually happen in modern multi-processor systems. Especially essential were faithful implementations of the memory consistency model and cache coherence protocol, as well as timing randomization. We demonstrate how such a co-simulation environment can be constructed from existing tools and software. Lessons from our study can similarly be applied to design and verification of other tightly-coupled systems. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2012 | 10.1145/2380445.2380524 | CODES+ISSS |
Keywords | Field | DocType |
software co-design,processor bus functional model,commodity multi-processor system,native software execution,cache coherence protocol,co-verification case study,co-simulation environment,custom hardware,hdl simulator,non-trivial design,conventional bfm methodology,functional verification,memory consistency model,system-level hardware,fpga prototyping,transactional memory | x86,Functional verification,Computer science,Real-time computing,Transactional memory,Software,Consistency model,Bus Functional Model,Computer architecture,Parallel computing,FPGA prototype,Embedded system,Cache coherence | Conference |
Citations | PageRank | References |
1 | 0.35 | 12 |
Authors | ||
6 | ||
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sungpack Hong | 1 | 864 | 33.20 |
| Tayo Oguntebi | 2 | 360 | 13.47 |
| Jared Casper | 3 | 824 | 34.12 |
| Nathan Bronson | 4 | 408 | 17.79 |
| Christos Kozyrakis | 5 | 5817 | 355.99 |
| Kunle Olukotun | 6 | 4532 | 373.50 |