Conservative Application-Level Performance Analysis Through Simulation of MPSoCs

Applications, often with real-time requirements, are mapped onto Multi-Processor Systems on Chip (MPSoCs). Hard real-time applications require no deadline misses, and a formal modelling approach must be used to analyze the worst-case performance, which is complicated and time consuming. Such models are restricted to specific application behaviors and not generally applicable. Soft real-time applications such as video decoders often do not fit these models while having less strict requirements. An infrequent frame drop is barely noticeable, and a worst-case analysis is too pessimistic. For such applications it suffices to meet deadlines for a given set of traces.