Parallel co-simulation using virtual synchronization with redundant host execution

In traditional parallel co-simulation approaches, the simulation speed is heavily limited by time synchronization overhead between simulators and idle time caused by data dependency. Recent work has shown that the time synchronization overhead can be reduced significantly by predicting the next synchronization points more effectively or by separating trace-driven architecture simulation from trace generation from component simulators. The latter is known as virtual synchronization technique. In this paper, we propose redundant host execution to minimize the simulation idle time caused by data dependency in simulation models. By combining virtual synchronization and redundant host execution techniques we could make parallel execution of multiple simulators a viable solution for fast but cycle-accurate co-simulation. Experiments show about 40% performance gain over a technique which uses virtual synchronization only.