Misse: a Multi-level Intelligent Synthesis and Simulation Environment

Multi-level Intelligent Synthesis and Simulation Environment (MISSE) is an object-oriented, top-down, high-level design environment for multiprocessor systems. Three important aspects of multiprocessor system design: modeling, synthesis, and simulation are supported in MISSE. First, multiprocessor systems are hierarchically classified and system parts modeled as objects with interrelationships. Second, two system level design methodologies: Performance Synthesis Methodology and Intelligent Concurrent Object-Oriented Synthesis Methodology are proposed and implemented in MISSE. Third, an object-oriented flexible simulation tool, Modularized Reconfigurable Simulator, is proposed to simulate the various synthesized design alternatives. In a typical design process using MISSE, a multiprocessor system is iteratively modeled, classified, synthesized, simulated, and its performance evaluated at each of the four MISSE-levels: system, cluster, node, and instruction. The environment is theoretically consolidated by an analytical model called Multi-token Object-oriented Bidirectional net, which is a high-level Petri net similar to the popularly used Colored Petri net. Besides the systematic design of a complete multiprocessor system, MISSE can also be used to explore the design of new interconnection architectures, to verify fault-tolerant architecture schemes, to validate performance bounds of multiprocessor task scheduling algorithms, and to test parallel application software. Thus, MISSE is suitable for the rapid prototyping of completely new systems as well as for the evaluation and improvement of existing ones.