Exploiting Thread and Data Level Parallelism for Ultimate Parallel SystemC Simulation

Abstract

Most parallel SystemC approaches have two limitations: (a) the user must manually separate all parallel threads to avoid data corruption due to race conditions, and (b) available hardware vector units are not utilized. In this paper, we present an advanced compiler infrastructure for automatic parallelization of SystemC models at the thread-level. In addition, our infrastructure exploits opportunities for data-level parallelization. Our experimental results show a nearly linear speedup of NxM, where N and M denote the thread and data-level factors, respectively. In turn, a 4-core multi-processor achieves a speedup of up to 8.8x, and a 60-core Xeon Phi processor reaches up to 212x.