Timed-Value Streams

The Timed-Value Stream Library provides an advanced framework for instrumentation, pre-processing and recording of functional and extra-functional properties in SystemC-based virtual prototyping simulations.

This repository contains an implementation of the library described in the paper Advanced SystemC Tracing and Analysis Framework for Extra-Functional Properties, Philipp A. Hartmann, Kim Grüttner, and Wolfgang Nebel, Procceedings of the 11th International Symposium on Applied Reconfigurable Computing (ARC’15).

Abstract

System-level simulations are an important part in the design flow for today’s complex systems-on-a-chip. Trade-off analysis during architectural exploration as well as run-time reconfiguration of applications and their mapping require detailed introspection of the dynamic effects on the target platform. Additionally, extra-functional properties like power consumption and performance characteristics are important metrics to assess the quality of a design. In this paper, we present an advanced framework for instrumentation, pre-processing and recording of functional and extra-functional properties in SystemC-based virtual prototyping simulations. The framework is based on a hierarchy of so-called timed value streams, allowing to address the requirements for highly configurable, dynamic architectures while allowing tailored introspection of the required system characteristics under analysis.

The full paper is available at http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-16214-0\_12

Build System and Dependencies

The library requires the build system CMake 3.7.

Library Dependencies

The library requires a compiler with C++14 support. It was successfully tested with the following toolchains:

• gcc-5, gcc-6, gcc-7
• clang-3.8, clang-5.0, clang-6.0

External dependencies:

• boost>=1.51
• SystemC>=2.3.2 (optional)

Building the Library

To build the library, create a build directory and run cmake in the new directory while pointing it to the source directory. Assuming the the repository has been cloned/extracted in $PWD, the following commands will generate the build files:

mkdir -p build
cd build
cmake ..

After that, the library can be built using:

cmake --build .

Build Options

The canonical way to modify the build settings is to use user-interface tools such as ccmake or cmake-gui. Additionally, it is possible to list all build settings on the command line using cmake -L and provide them to the build system when creating or updating the build cache, e.g.:

cmake .. -D<var>=<value>

Refer to the CMake documentation cmake(1) for a more detailed description on how to change the build options.

The Timed-Value Streams can be configured with the following build options (ON/OFF):

TVS_USE_SYSTEMC

build the library with SystemC support (default: on)

TVS_ENABLE_DOCS

build documentation using Doxygen (default: off)

TVS_ENABLE_TESTS

build the test suite (default: on)

SystemC Dependency

By default, the library is compiled with SystemC support enabled. This provides integration support of the created streams into the the SystemC module hierarchy. Streams will therefore be created as sc_core::sc_object instances within the SystemC module hierarchy. Furthermore, the library will use the SystemC time type sc_core::sc_time as its time unit for absolute times and durations in the tuples. The standalone variant of the library uses the boost::units datatypes for representing time durations and provides its own, minimal object registry for supporting name-based stream binding.

If a build with SystemC support is requested (by default), the CMake build system will first search for a suitable SystemC library via the internal find_package mechanism (refer to cmake-packages(7) for more information). If SystemC cannot be found, the mechanism falls back to the default library directories and the SYSTEMC_HOME environment variable. In case of this manual approach, the user needs to ensure that the compilation settings of the SystemC library and the Timed-Value Streams are consistent.

Test Suite and Documentation

The library contains a test suite which is built by default and contains unit tests and example files. The unit tests require the Google Test framework gtest. If gtest is not available on your system, the build system will automatically download and compile the dependency locally. The build option TVS_ENABLE_TESTS controls if the test suite should be built.

The setting TVS_ENABLE_DOCS enables generating a preliminary API documentation using Doxygen.