A case study on message-based discrete event simulation for Transaction Level Modeling

Transaction Level Modeling is a system-level design methodology for early design space exploration. The increasing complexity of systems makes it necessary to improve simulation performance. Using parallel discrete event simulation approaches seems promising to speedup the simulation runs of complex transaction level models. One of such approaches is the message-based PDES approach which is applied to TLM in this paper. Two different TLM case studies are used to evaluate and compare the execution times of sequential and message-based simulation. We show that with message-based simulation a speedup over sequential simulation can be achieved even if using only one processor core. This result lies the foundation for further speedup if running on multiple cores as no more significant synchronization overhead is expected.