A system-level simulation framework for evaluating task migration in MPSoCs

Task migration is the transfer of the execution of a process (task) from one processing element to another. It originates from the massive deployment of distributed systems in the parallel computing field to enable dynamic load distribution, fault resilience and to enhance data access locality. With the development of MultiProcessor System-on-Chip (MPSoC) architectures, the topic of task migration has recently regained research interest in the embedded systems domain. In this paper, we present a high-level simulation framework to study task migration for MPSoC systems. With this framework, different migration methodologies on different underlying hardware systems can be easily and rapidly modeled, simulated and evaluated during the early stages of design. By using this high-level simulation framework, a designer can study the migration impact on the overall performance of the system by exploring different task migration mechanisms (determining what and how to migrate) or using different migration policies (determining when to migrate which tasks whereto) in a specific task migration mechanism. Using a number of experiments, we demonstrate the capabilities of our simulation framework.