High level simulation of SVP many-core systems

The Microgrid is a many-core architecture comprising multiple clusters of fine-grained multi-threaded cores. The SVP API supported by the cores allows for the asynchronous delegation of work to different clusters of cores which can be acquired dynamically. We want to explore the execution of complex applications and their interaction with dynamically allocated resources. To date, any evaluation of the Microgrid has used a detailed emulation with a cycle accurate simulation of the execution time. Although the emulator can be used to evaluate small program kernels, it only executes at a rate of 100K instructions per second, divided over the number of emulated cores. This makes it inefficient to evaluate a complex application executing on many cores using dynamic allocation of clusters. In order to obtain a more efficient evaluation we have developed a co-simulation environment that executes high level SVP control code but which abstracts the scheduling of the low-level threads using two different techniques. The co-simulation is evaluated for both performance and simulation accuracy.