Automatic workload generation for system-level exploration based on modified GCC compiler

Future embedded system products, e.g. smart handheld mobile terminals, will accommodate a large number of applications that will partly run sequentially and independently, partly concurrently and interacting on massively parallel computing platforms. Already for systems of moderate complexity, the design space will be huge and its exploration requires that the system architect is able to quickly evaluate the performances of candidate architectures and application mappings. The mainstream evaluation technique today is the system-level performance simulation of the applications and platforms using abstracted workload and processing capacity models, respectively. These virtual system models allow fast simulation of large systems at an early phase of development with reasonable modeling effort and time. The accuracy of the performance results is dependent on how closely the models used reflect the actual system. This paper presents a compiler based technique for automatic generation of workload models for performance simulation, while exploiting an overall approach and platform performance capacity models developed previously. The resulting workload models are experimented using x264 video and JPEG encoding application examples