1,575 research outputs found
A Complete Multi-Processor System-on-Chip FPGA-Based Emulation Framework
With the growing complexity in consumer embedded products and the improvements in process technology, Multi-Processor System-On-Chip (MPSoC) architectures have become widespread. These new systems are very complex to design as they must execute multiple complex real-time applications (e.g. video processing, or videogames), while meeting several additional design constraints (e.g. energy consumption or time-to-market). Therefore, mechanisms to efficiently explore the different possible HW-SW design interactions in complete MPSoC systems are in great need. In this paper, we present a new FPGA-based emulation framework that allows designers to rapidly explore a large range of MPSoC design alternatives at the cycle-accurate level. Our results show that the proposed framework is able to extract a number of critical statistics from processing cores, memory and interconnection systems, with a speed-up of three orders of magnitude compared to cycle accurate MPSoC simulators
An Automated Design-flow for FPGA-based Sequential Simulation
In this paper we describe the automated design flow that will transform and map a given homogeneous or heterogeneous hardware design into an FPGA that performs a cycle accurate simulation. The flow replaces the required manually performed transformation and can be embedded in existing standard synthesis flows. Compared to the earlier manually translated designs, this automated flow resulted in a reduced number of FPGA hardware resources and higher simulation frequencies. The implementation of the complete design flow is work in progress.\u
HW-SW Emulation Framework for Temperature-Aware Design in MPSoCs
New tendencies envisage Multi-Processor Systems-On-Chip (MPSoCs) as a promising solution for the consumer electronics market. MPSoCs are complex to design, as they must execute multiple applications (games, video), while meeting additional design constraints (energy consumption, time-to-market). Moreover, the rise of temperature in the die for MPSoCs can seriously affect their final performance and reliability. In this paper, we present a new hardware-software emulation framework that allows designers a complete exploration of the thermal behavior of final MPSoC designs early in the design flow. The proposed framework uses FPGA emulation as the key element to model the hardware components of the considered MPSoC platform at multi-megahertz speeds. It automatically extracts detailed system statistics that are used as input to our software thermal library running in a host computer. This library calculates at run-time the temperature of on-chip components, based on the collected statistics from the emulated system and the final floorplan of the MPSoC. This enables fast testing of various thermal management techniques. Our results show speed-ups of three orders of magnitude compared to cycle-accurate MPSoC simulator
Fast, Accurate and Detailed NoC Simulations
Network-on-Chip (NoC) architectures have a wide variety of parameters that can be adapted to the designer's requirements. Fast exploration of this parameter space is only possible at a high-level and several methods have been proposed. Cycle and bit accurate simulation is necessary when the actual router's RTL description needs to be evaluated and verified. However, extensive simulation of the NoC architecture with cycle and bit accuracy is prohibitively time consuming. In this paper we describe a simulation method to simulate large parallel homogeneous and heterogeneous network-on-chips on a single FPGA. The method is especially suitable for parallel systems where lengthy cycle and bit accurate simulations are required. As a case study, we use a NoC that was modelled and simulated in SystemC. We simulate the same NoC on the described FPGA simulator. This enables us to observe the NoC behavior under a large variety of traffic patterns. Compared with the SystemC simulation we achieved a speed-up of 80-300, without compromising the cycle and bit level accuracy
Caracterización y optimización térmica de sistemas en chip mediante emulación con FPGAs
Tesis inédita de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Facultad de Informática, Departamento de Arquitectura de Computadores y Automática, leída el 15/06/2012Tablets and smartphones are some of the many intelligent devices that dominate the consumer electronics market. These systems are complex to design as they must execute multiple applications (e.g.: real-time video processing, 3D games, or wireless communications), while meeting additional design constraints, such as low energy consumption, reduced implementation size and, of course, a short time-to-market. Internally, they rely on Multi-processor Systems on Chip (MPSoCs) as their main processing cores, to meet the tight design constraints: performance, size, power consumption, etc. In a bad design, the high logic density may generate hotspots that compromise the chip reliability. This thesis introduces a FPGA-based emulation framework for easy exploration of SoC design alternatives. It provides fast and accurate estimations of performance, power, temperature, and reliability in one unified flow, to help designers tune their system architecture before going to silicon.El estado del arte, en lo que a diseño de chips para empotrados se refiere, se encuentra dominado por los multi-procesadores en chip, o MPSoCs. Son complejos de diseñar y presentan problemas de disipación de potencia, de temperatura, y de fiabilidad. En este contexto, esta tesis propone una nueva plataforma de emulación para facilitar la exploración del enorme espacio de diseño.
La plataforma utiliza una FPGA de propósito general para acelerar la emulación, lo cual le da una ventaja competitiva frente a los simuladores arquitectónicos software, que son mucho más lentos. Los datos obtenidos de la ejecución en la FPGA son enviados a un PC que contiene bibliotecas (modelos) SW para calcular el comportamiento (e.g.: la temperatura, el rendimiento, etc...) que tendría el chip final. La parte experimental está enfocada a dos puntos: por un lado, a verificar que el sistema funciona correctamente y, por otro, a demostrar la utilidad del entorno para realizar exploraciones que muestren los efectos a largo plazo que suceden dentro del chip, como puede ser la evolución de la temperatura, que es un fenómeno lento que normalmente requiere de costosas simulaciones software.Depto. de Arquitectura de Computadores y AutomáticaFac. de InformáticaTRUEunpu
HERO: Heterogeneous Embedded Research Platform for Exploring RISC-V Manycore Accelerators on FPGA
Heterogeneous embedded systems on chip (HESoCs) co-integrate a standard host
processor with programmable manycore accelerators (PMCAs) to combine
general-purpose computing with domain-specific, efficient processing
capabilities. While leading companies successfully advance their HESoC
products, research lags behind due to the challenges of building a prototyping
platform that unites an industry-standard host processor with an open research
PMCA architecture. In this work we introduce HERO, an FPGA-based research
platform that combines a PMCA composed of clusters of RISC-V cores, implemented
as soft cores on an FPGA fabric, with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore host
processor. The PMCA architecture mapped on the FPGA is silicon-proven,
scalable, configurable, and fully modifiable. HERO includes a complete software
stack that consists of a heterogeneous cross-compilation toolchain with support
for OpenMP accelerator programming, a Linux driver, and runtime libraries for
both host and PMCA. HERO is designed to facilitate rapid exploration on all
software and hardware layers: run-time behavior can be accurately analyzed by
tracing events, and modifications can be validated through fully automated hard
ware and software builds and executed tests. We demonstrate the usefulness of
HERO by means of case studies from our research
ControlPULP: A RISC-V On-Chip Parallel Power Controller for Many-Core HPC Processors with FPGA-Based Hardware-In-The-Loop Power and Thermal Emulation
High-Performance Computing (HPC) processors are nowadays integrated
Cyber-Physical Systems demanding complex and high-bandwidth closed-loop power
and thermal control strategies. To efficiently satisfy real-time multi-input
multi-output (MIMO) optimal power requirements, high-end processors integrate
an on-die power controller system (PCS).
While traditional PCSs are based on a simple microcontroller (MCU)-class
core, more scalable and flexible PCS architectures are required to support
advanced MIMO control algorithms for managing the ever-increasing number of
cores, power states, and process, voltage, and temperature variability.
This paper presents ControlPULP, an open-source, HW/SW RISC-V parallel PCS
platform consisting of a single-core MCU with fast interrupt handling coupled
with a scalable multi-core programmable cluster accelerator and a specialized
DMA engine for the parallel acceleration of real-time power management
policies. ControlPULP relies on FreeRTOS to schedule a reactive power control
firmware (PCF) application layer.
We demonstrate ControlPULP in a power management use-case targeting a
next-generation 72-core HPC processor. We first show that the multi-core
cluster accelerates the PCF, achieving 4.9x speedup compared to single-core
execution, enabling more advanced power management algorithms within the
control hyper-period at a shallow area overhead, about 0.1% the area of a
modern HPC CPU die. We then assess the PCS and PCF by designing an FPGA-based,
closed-loop emulation framework that leverages the heterogeneous SoCs paradigm,
achieving DVFS tracking with a mean deviation within 3% the plant's thermal
design power (TDP) against a software-equivalent model-in-the-loop approach.
Finally, we show that the proposed PCF compares favorably with an
industry-grade control algorithm under computational-intensive workloads.Comment: 33 pages, 11 figure
From plasma to beefarm: Design experience of an FPGA-based multicore prototype
In this paper, we take a MIPS-based open-source uniprocessor soft core, Plasma, and extend it to obtain the Beefarm infrastructure for FPGA-based multiprocessor emulation, a popular research topic of the last few years both in the FPGA and the computer architecture communities. We discuss various design tradeoffs and we demonstrate superior scalability through experimental results compared to traditional software instruction set simulators. Based on our experience of designing and building a complete FPGA-based multiprocessor emulation system that supports run-time and compiler infrastructure and on the actual executions of our experiments running Software Transactional Memory (STM) benchmarks, we comment on the pros, cons and future trends of using hardware-based emulation for research.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Heracles: A Tool for Fast RTL-Based Design Space Exploration of Multicore Processors
This paper presents Heracles, an open-source, functional, parameterized, synthesizable multicore system toolkit. Such a multi/many-core design platform is a powerful and versatile research and teaching tool for architectural exploration and hardware-software co-design. The Heracles toolkit comprises the soft hardware (HDL) modules, application compiler, and graphical user interface. It is designed with a high degree of modularity to support fast exploration of future multicore processors of di erent topologies, routing schemes, processing elements (cores), and memory system organizations. It is a component-based framework with parameterized interfaces and strong emphasis on module reusability. The compiler toolchain is used to map C or C++ based applications onto the processing units. The GUI allows the user to quickly con gure and launch a system instance for easy factorial development and evaluation. Hardware modules are implemented in synthesizable Verilog and are FPGA platform independent. The Heracles tool is freely available under the open-source MIT license at: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/heracle
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