COSSIM

COSSIM An Integrated Solution to Address the Simulator Gap for Parallel Heterogeneous Systems

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. COSSIM offers an open-source, highly-performance framework that can handle the simulation of a complete system-of-systems including processors, peripherals and networks that can appeal to CPS and Highly Parallel Heterogeneous Systems designers and application developers. The holistic approach of the framework is augmented with a security tool that can tap on all components and perform security and robustness analysis previously unfeasible.

COSSIM Tutorial on YouTube

COSSIM Official Website

The COSSIM Framework

COSSIM is an open-source framework that can simulate Highly Parallel Systems or more generally Systems of Systems

COSSIM is built on top of several well-established simulators:

  • GEM5, a state of the art full-system simulator, to simulate
    the digital components of each processing node in the simulated system
  • OMNET++, which is an established network simulator, to simulate
    the networking infrastructure
  • McPAT to provide energy and power consumption estimations of
    the processing nodes and MiXIM (OMNET++ addon) to estimate the
    energy consumption of the network
To bind the whole framework together, COSSIM employs the HLA architecture
through the open-source CERTI package. Security and robustness testing is
handled through a custom, internally-developed security tool.
Framework Features
A unified Eclipse-based GUI has been developed to provide easy simulation set-up, execution and visualization of results.
The framework supports parallel execution taking advantage of multi-core/processor systems as well as distributed systems.
Each component of the framework has been extended to provide additional features or increase accuracy of results and broaden scope of use. Highlights include advanced synchronization mechanisms to established a common notion of time between all simulated systems, extended network support for full Linux-based protocol stacks.
Through HLA and proper modifications to the basic components, COSSIM framework can be connected to other tools to enable simulation of devices, events or physical processes (e.g. support for Ptolemy).
COSSIM integrates for the first time security measurement models and methodologies that have full access to all simulated components (memories, processor states, code, network).