Modelling reconfigurable systems in event driven simulation.

Reconfigurable platforms allow hardware developers to customise their designs for specific applications. However, their adoption involves challenges in understanding and estimating the impact of various design parameters and approaches. This paper proposes a unified framework to model behaviour of reconfigurable systems using an event driven simulation approach. This provides an abstract yet informative method to capture both analytical relationships and empirical parameters of reconfigurable systems. It can be used to help making design decisions or verifying analytical models. We apply this approach to three models of reconfigurable applications to estimate the communication efficiency of networked clusters, and the performance and energy efficiency of runtime reconfigurable designs for software-defined radio and for option pricing in finance. The results show that, through this simulation framework, we can verify the accuracy of analytical models and also obtain practical information that is not provided by analytical models.