Multiprocessor simulation using communicating sequential processes

Abstract

To tackle the increasing complexity of capturing the design and subsequent simulation of multicore/multiprocessor systems, it may be beneficial to consider formal methods of high-level design. However, current formal methods of high-level multiprocessor system design and simulation often use sequential/parallel discrete event simulation with cooperative multithreading and hence do not exploit the true multiprocessing capabilities of simulation hosts now available even at the desktop computing level. Hence in this article, we present our ongoing research work on a multiprocessor simulator based on the formal method of communicating sequential processes (CSP). Here, we show how a multiprocessor system can be described using the operators of CSP. Furthermore, we show how this formal description of a multiprocessor system can be mapped to the functions provided by the Kent C++CSP multithreading library for creating a multithreaded multiprocessor simulator. Finally, we present the results of the simulator performance obtained using two applications.