5. System Exploration

Future embedded system products, e.g. smart handheld mobile terminals, will accommodate a large number of applications that will partly run sequentially and independently, partly concurrently and interacting on massively parallel computing platforms. Already for systems of moderate complexity, the design space will be huge and its exploration requires that the system architect is able to quickly evaluate the performances of candidate architectures and application mappings. The mainstream evaluation technique today is the system-level performance simulation of the applications and platforms using abstracted workload and processing capacity models, respectively. These virtual system models allow fast simulation of large systems at an early phase of development with reasonable modelling effort and time. The accuracy of the performance results is dependent on how closely the models used reflect the actual system. This chapter gives a description of the ABSOLUT modelling and simulation approach. Firstly, it gives an outline view of the approach and its evolution. Secondly, it describes how to create different models. Thirdly, it describes the means for simulation.