Sigma Vp: Host-Gpu Multiplexing For Efficient Simulation Of Multiple Embedded Gpus On Virtual Platforms

Despite their proliferation across many embedded platforms, GP Us present still many challenges to embedded-system designers. In particular, CPU-optimized software actually slows down the execution of embedded applications on system simulators. This problem is worse for concurrent simulations of multiple instances of embedded devices equipped with GPUs. To address this challenge, we present Sigma VP, a framework to accelerate concurrent simulations of multiple virtual platforms by leveraging the physical GPUs present on the host machine. Sigma VP multiplexes the host GPUs to speed up the concurrent simulations without requiring any change to the original CPU-optimized application code. With Sigma VP, GPU applications run more than 600 times faster than GPU-software emulation on virtual platforms. We also propose Kernel Interleaving and Kernel Coalescing, two techniques that further speed up the simulation by one order of magnitude. Finally, we show how Sigma VP supports simulation-based functional validation and performance/power estimation.