A system-level simulation framework for evaluating resource management policies for heterogeneous system architectures

Nowadays, heterogeneous system architectures, integrating CPUs and one or more kinds of accelerators (e.g., GPUs or HW accelerators), are a promising solution to achieve high performance for data-intensive workloads while fulfilling other system-level requirements on the available power/energy budgets. However, heterogeneity comes at the cost of greater design and management complexity leading to an increasing quest for the definition of innovative runtime resource management policies. We propose a system-level simulation framework implemented in SystemC and Transaction Level Modeling for a fast evaluation of resource management policies for such systems to provide a quick feedback to the middleware designer. A set of case studies shows the efficiency of the proposed framework in supporting a fast analysis of the investigated policies.