In an era of complex networked parallel heterogeneous systems, simulating independently only parts, components, or attributes of a system-under-design is a cumbersome, inaccurate, and inefficient approach. Moreover, by considering each part of a system in an isolated manner, and due to the numerous and highly complicated interactions between the different components, the system optimization capabilities are severely limited. The presented fully-distributed simulation framework (called as COSSIM) is the first known open-source, high-performance simulator that can handle holistically system-of-systems including processors, peripherals and networks; such an approach is very appealing to both Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and Highly Parallel Heterogeneous Systems designers and application developers. Our highly integrated approach is further augmented with accurate power estimation and security sub-tools that can tap on all system components and perform security and robustness analysis of the overall system under design—something that was unfeasible up to now. Additionally, a sophisticated Eclipse-based Graphical User Interface (GUI) has been developed to provide easy simulation setup, execution, and visualization of results. COSSIM has been evaluated when executing the widely used Netperf benchmark suite as well as a number of real-world applications. Final results demonstrate that the presented approach has up to 99% accuracy (when compared with the performance of the real system), while the overall simulation time can be accelerated almost linearly with the number of CPUs utilized by the simulator.

In an era of complex networked heterogeneous systems, simulating independently only parts, components or attributes of a system under design is not a viable, accurate or efficient option. The interactions are too many and too complicated to produce meaningful results and the optimization opportunities are severely limited when considering each part of a system in an isolated manner. The presented COSSIM simulation framework is the first known open-source, high-performance simulator that can handle holistically system-of-systems including processors, peripherals and networks; such an approach is very appealing to both CPS/IoT and Highly Parallel Heterogeneous Systems designers and application developers. Our highly integrated approach is further augmented with accurate power estimation and security sub-tools that can tap on all system components and perform security and robustness analysis of the overall networked system. Additionally, a GUI has been developed to provide easy simulation set-up, execution and visualization of results. COSSIM has been evaluated using real-world applications representing cloud (mobile visual search) and CPS systems (building management) demonstrating high accuracy and performance that scales almost linearly with the number of CPUs dedicated to the simulator.

In this paper, we present an open-source Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) simulation framework that aims to address the limitations of currently available tools. Our solution models the computing devices of the processing nodes and the network that comprise the CPS system and thus provides cycle accurate results, realistic communications and power/energy consumption estimates based on the actual dynamic usage scenarios. The simulator provides the necessary hooks to security testing software and can be extended through an IEEE standardized interface to include additional tools, such as simulators of physical models.