FPGA prototyping of custom GPGPUs

Abstract

Prototyping new systems on hardware is a time-consuming task with limited scope for architectural exploration. The aim of this work was to perform fast prototyping of general-purpose graphics processing units (GPGPUs) on field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) using a novel tool chain. This hardware flow combined with the higher level simulation flow using the same source code allowed us to create a whole tool chain to study and build future architectures using new technologies. It also gave us enough flexibility at different granularities to make architectural decisions. We will also discuss some example systems that were built using this tool chain along with some results.M.S