Simics provides several benefits for multicore development teams. The VSD-based process that can achieve sweeping cost and schedule savings across product marketing, software engineering, integration and test, support and sales.

Virtualized Systems Development for Multicore Applications

Parallel processing systems can take many different shapes or forms, including using multicore processors, multiple discrete processors on a single board, multiple single-processor boards within a rack, multiple boards each populated with multicore processors, or distributed systems containing many systems connected over networks. All such systems feature parallel, concurrent, processing of programs and data across the complete system, often on a massive scale. Parallel systems pose many unique development challenges that simply did not exist when developing products for single processor platforms. Simics can ease many aspects of multicore product development including:

• Systems Architecture Definition: Simics allows developers to run "What-If?" scenarios long before the system architecture is finalized or the hardware available.  Engineers can experiment with various system topologies to define the best architecture.  Simics is modular, so variants of a primary design are relatively easy to implement and test.
• Software development: Simics virtual platforms are functionally identical to the physical hardware from the perspective of the hardware/software interface.  As a result, both the model and the actual hardware will run precisely the same compiled firmware, operating system porting, device driver, and application codes.
• System Debugging:  Simics provides a fully virtualized development environment with an ability to analyze and debug a multicore or multi-node system far beyond what is available on physical hardware using JTAG or other debugging tools.
• Hardware Trace Acquisition:  Detailed hardware trace information can be acquired for any virtual platform, model or CPU that Simics supports.  This trace information can then be used to debug the system or, when combined with 3rd party tools, to optimize software applications to run on multicore platforms.

Beyond the Obvious: How Simics Helps Product Work Flow

The use of Simics allows companies to adopt a Virtualized Systems Development(TM) (VSD) based process to augment the more traditional work flows. VSD, beyond the obvious hardware replacment use case, has the ability to improve a number of project-related work flows including:

• Hardware Indepent Software Development
• Systems scalability
• Improved development team efficiency
• Integration and test
• Customer support
• Sales team enablement
• Eco-System creation

Virtutech customers have stated that the performance and fidelity of Simics combined with a VSD-enabled process benefits over 90% of their development and integration effort.

 

Virtutech Ecosystem for Multicore

Virtutech is working closely with software companies such as PolyCore Software and CriticalBlue to offer solutions that provide the flexibility to migrate applications to multicore system architectures or create wholly new multicore system topologies, all within an environment that are high performance, flexible, scalable and debuggable.