Running the system, either in emulation or on the system hardware, presents a series of potential challenges and opportunities. When running the system for the first time, you can profile the application to identify bottlenecks, or performance issues that offer opportunities to optimize the design, as discussed in the sections below.
A system-level view of program execution can be helpful in identifying problems during program execution, including correctness and performance issues. Tracing the application is useful for detecting events not synchronized in between PS, PL and AI Engine. On the AI Engine side, issues such as missing or mismatching locks, buffer overruns, and incorrect programming of DMA buffers are examples that are difficult to debug by using explicit print statements or by using traditional interactive debuggers. A systematic way of collecting system level traces for the program execution is needed. The AI Engine architecture has direct support for generation, collection, and streaming of events as trace data during simulation, hardware emulation, or hardware execution.