In one aspect, the present invention overcomes the limitations of the prior art by providing a logic simulation system that uses a VLIW simulation processor with many parallel processor elements to accelerate the simulation of synthesizable tasks but that also supports non-synthesizable tasks and/or branching. In one approach, the VLIW simulation processor is based on an architecture that does not have an on-chip instruction cache. Instead, VLIW instruction words stream in directly from a program memory and the individual processor elements are programmed continuously based on the instruction words. This also allows the efficient implementation of side-entrance jumps, where a region of code can be entered in the middle of the region rather than always requiring entrance from the top. In another aspect, non-synthesizable tasks can be efficiently handled by exception handlers.