Performance Model Generation for MPSoC Design-Space Exploration

Multi-processor system-on-chip (MPSoC) design is profiting considerably from the trend towards model-driven design. Design choices in this area cover considerations on alternative parallellisations of application software, alternative architectures for the hardware platform and different ways to map applications onto the platform. Various paradigms exist for modelling applications and also for modelling platforms. This paper presents a tool for generating abstract performance models of MPSoC systems to further automate their design-space exploration. The tool supports several traditional paradigms for specifying applications and uses a new model of architecture to enable describing hardware platforms at a much higher abstraction level than traditional hardware description languages. The tool relies on a collection of modelling patterns to convert application and platform specifications together with a mapping into one unifying model expressed in a formal general-purpose modelling language that offers extensive support for performance analysis.