Taxim: A Toolchain for Automated and Configurable Simulation for Embedded Multiprocessor Design

TL;DR

Taxim automates the design and simulation of multicore embedded systems, significantly reducing setup time and errors compared to manual configuration, thus streamlining architecture exploration.

Contribution

The paper introduces Taxim, a toolchain that automates topology creation and simulation setup for multicore systems, improving efficiency and accuracy over manual methods.

Findings

Taxim creates complex processor configuration files in under 10 milliseconds.

Automated topology generation reduces human errors in simulation setup.

Taxim accelerates the design process for multicore architectures with irregular cache hierarchies.

Abstract

Multicore embedded systems have been constantly researched to improve the efficiency by changing certain metrics, such as processor, memory, cache hierarchies and their cache configurations. Using Multi2Sim and McPAT simulators in combination allows the user to design various multiprocessing architectures and estimate performance, power, area and timing metrics. However, the design time required to simulate these systems is daunting and prone to human error. In this paper, we introduce Taxim, a toolchain that can automatically create requested multicore on-chip topologies along with minimizing the simulation time due to repetitive tasks between architectural power, energy and timing simulations. Taxim's decision-tree-based topology synthesis tool creates processor configuration files that can be highly erroneous when generated manually. The toolchain also automates the steps from design entry to output report extraction by running automation scripts, and listing the results. Our experiments show that multiprocessing architectures with 32 cores and irregular cache hierarchies are more than 1k lines of code in Multi2Sim's processor configuration format and Taxim can create such a file in less than 10 milliseconds. The source code is freely available at https://github.com/bouncaslab/TaXim/.