A trace-based scenario database for high-level simulation of multimedia MP-SoCs

High-level simulation and design space exploration nowadays are key ingredients for system-level design of modern multimedia embedded systems. The majority of the work in this area evaluates systems under a single, fixed application workload. In reality, however, the application workload in such systems (i.e., the applications that are concurrently executing and contending for system resources), and therefore the intensity and nature of the application demands, can change dramatically over time. To facilitate the simulation and exploration of different workload scenarios, this paper presents the concept of a so-called scenario database, which has been integrated in our Sesame system-level simulation framework. This scenario database compactly stores application scenarios and allows for generating application workloads - in the form of event traces - belonging to the stored scenarios for the purpose of scenario-aware simulation in Sesame.