Distributing SoC Simulations over a Network of Computers

This paper presents parallelization of System-on-Chip(SoC) simulation over a network of computers. A customC-language-based SoC exploration and simulation tool,Discrete Time Network Simulator (DTNS), is used toexamine the problem. Parallelization is implemented witheither CORBA or TCP/IP sockets. The distributed DTNSarchitecture facilitates the analysis of computationrequirements for reasonable distribution. The minimumexecution time per distributed process for theparallelization to be profitable is 1.2ms with CORBA and0.4ms with TCP/IP implementation. These results arebased on our networked PCs running the Linux operatingsystem. The same network is used to evaluate thisdistribution method in case of video encoder SoCsimulation.