We show experimental evidence and argue that communication-centric modelling of complex embedded computing systems provides predictive power over the workload dependent behaviour of these systems. System and external observables included in this behaviour can be utilised in the system's analysis. We provide the preliminary results from our detection (monitoring) and imitation (simulation) phases, both part of a larger workflow in development.

Daedalus is a system-level design flow for the design of multiprocessor system-on-chip (MP-SoC) based embedded multimedia systems. It offers a fully integrated tool-flow in which design space exploration (DSE), system-level synthesis, application mapping, and system prototyping of MP-SoCs are highly automated. In this paper, we describe our first industrial deployment experiences with the Daedalus framework. Daedalus is currently being deployed in the early stages of the design of an image compression system for very high resolution cameras targeting medical appliances. In this context, we performed a DSE study with a JPEG encoder application, which exploits both task and data parallelism. This application was mapped onto a range of different MP-SoC architectures. We achieved a performance speed-up of up to 20x compared to a single processor system. In addition, the results show that the Daedalus high-level MP-SoC models accurately predict the overall system performance, i.e., the performance error is around 5%.

The sheer complexity of today's embedded systems forces designers to start with modeling and simulating system components and their interactions in the very early design stages. It is therefore imperative to have good tools for exploring a wide range of design choices, especially during the early design stages, where the design space is at its largest. This paper presents an overview of the Sesame framework, which provides high-level modeling and simulation methods and tools for system-level performance evaluation and exploration of heterogeneous embedded systems. More specifically, we describe Sesame's modeling methodology and trajectory. It takes a designer systematically along the path from selecting candidate architectures, using analytical modeling and multiobjective optimization, to simulating these candidate architectures with our system-level simulation environment. This simulation environment subsequently allows for architectural exploration at different levels of abstraction while maintaining high-level and architecture-independent application specifications. We illustrate all these aspects using a case study in which we traverse Sesame's exploration trajectory for a motion-JPEG encoder application.