Hardware and software as dual languages for computer system modeling

Complex computer systems can no longer be effectively designed without some consideration of the interaction of the hardware and software domains. Language-based behavioral specification for both simulation and synthesis in the hardware domain has made it possible to consider common models of computer system behavior with domain-specific inferences on the physical means of implementing the behavior. A dual computation modeling analogy is drawn for illustrating physical modeling inferences that overlap each domain and those which differ from domain to domain. The dual analogy illustrates the importance of preserving semantics of hardware and software modeling in separate languages. Peer-based co-execution of behavior specified in both modeling domains is possible because of reasoning about the interaction of the computation and state resources that are implied by modeling in each domain. We are uniting two existing hardware and software languages, Verilog and C using pthreads for an executable co-specification. We illustrate our approach with examples of our cosimulator.