FASTCUDA: Open Source FPGA Accelerator & Hardware-Software Codesign Toolset for CUDA Kernels

Using FPGAs as hardware accelerators that communicate with a central CPU is becoming a common practice in the embedded design world but there is no standard methodology and toolset to facilitate this path yet. On the other hand, languages such as CUDA and OpenCL provide standard development environments for Graphical Processing Unit (GPU) programming. FASTCUDA is a platform that provides the necessary software toolset, hardware architecture, and design methodology to efficiently adapt the CUDA approach into a new FPGA design flow. With FASTCUDA, the CUDA kernels of a CUDA-based application are partitioned into two groups with minimal user intervention: those that are compiled and executed in parallel software, and those that are synthesized and implemented in hardware. A modern low power FPGA can provide the processing power (via numerous embedded micro-CPUs) and the logic capacity for both the software and hardware implementations of the CUDA kernels. This paper describes the system requirements and the architectural decisions behind the FASTCUDA approach

Lightweight asynchronous scheduling in heterogeneous reconfigurable systems

The trend for heterogeneous embedded systems is the integration of accelerators and general-purpose CPU cores on the same die. In these integrated architectures, like the Zynq UltraScale+ board (CPU+FPGA) that we target in this work, hardware support for shared memory and low-overhead synchronization between the accelerator and the CPU cores make the case for exploring strategies that exploit a tight collaboration between the CPUs and the accelerator. In this paper we propose a novel lightweight scheduling strategy, FastFit, targeted to FPGA accelerators, and a new scheduler based on it, named MultiFastFit, which asynchronously tackles heterogeneous systems comprised of a variety of CPU cores and FPGA IPs. Our strategy significantly reduces the overhead to automatically compute the near-optimal chunksizes when compared to a previous state-of-the-art auto-tuned approach, which makes our approach more suitable for fine-grained applications. Additionally, our scheduler MultiFastFit has been designed to enable the efficient co-execution of work among compute devices in such a way that all the devices are busy while minimizing the load unbalance. Our approaches have been evaluated using four benchmarks carefully tuned for the low-power UltraScale+ platform. Our experiments demonstrate that the FastFit strategy always finds the near-optimal FPGA chunksize for any device configuration at a reasonable cost, even for fine-grained and irregular applications, and that heterogeneous CPU+FPGA co-executions that exploit all the compute devices are usually faster and more energy efficient than the CPU-only and FPGA-only executions. We have also compared MultiFastFit with other state-of-the-art scheduling strategies, finding that it outperforms other auto-tuned approach up to 2x and it achieves similar results to manually-tuned schedulers without requiring an offline search of the ideal CPU-FPGA partition or FPGA chunk granularity. © 2022 The Author

Refactoring software to heterogeneous parallel platforms

In summary, the papers included in this special issue are representative of the progress achieved by the research community at various levels from the very high level using parallel patterns to lower levels using, for example, transactional software memory. Also the integration of GPUs and FPGAs in the landscape is essential to achieve better performance in different categories of applications. All these innovative research directions will contribute to better achieve the long-term goal of better refactoring of existing applications to new and evolving parallel heterogeneous architectures

Design Space Exploration of Algorithmic Multi-Port Memories in High-Performance Application-Specific Accelerators

Memory load/store instructions consume an important part in execution time and energy consumption in domain-specific accelerators. For designing highly parallel systems, available parallelism at each granularity is extracted from the workloads. The maximal use of parallelism at each granularity in these high-performance designs requires the utilization of multi-port memories. Currently, true multiport designs are less popular because there is no inherent EDA support for multiport memory beyond 2-ports, utilizing more ports requires circuit-level implementation and hence a high design time. In this work, we present a framework for Design Space Exploration of Algorithmic Multi-Port Memories (AMM) in ASICs. We study different AMM designs in the literature, discuss how we incorporate them in the Pre-RTL Aladdin Framework with different memory depth, port configurations and banking structures. From our analysis on selected applications from the MachSuite (accelerator benchmark suite), we understand and quantify the potential use of AMMs (as true multiport memories) for high performance in applications with low spatial locality in memory access patterns

Baseband Data Handling System Using LEON3FT Processor

The data handling system is used to receive the data from the payloads of the satellite and format the data into suitable form so that it can be successfully received at the ground station. Data handling system consists of payload interface unit, preprocessor unit, data compression unit, data encryption unit, and channel coding and frame formatter. Till now, data handling systems were developed with the help of FPGAs. The current project involves the development of on board data handling system based on LEON3FT processor. Processor provides the advantages of reduced hardware complexity, programmability and computational performance

An efficient asynchronous spatial division multiplexing router for network-on-chip on the hardware platform

The quasi-delay-insensitive (QDI) based asynchronous network-on-chip (ANoC) has several advantages over clock-based synchronous network-on-chips (NoCs). The asynchronous router uses a virtual channel (VC) as a primary flow-control mechanism however, the spatial division multiplexing (SDM) based mechanism performs better over input traffics over VC. This manuscript uses an asynchronous spatial division multiplexing (ASDM) based router for NoC architecture on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) platform. The ASDM router is configurable to different bandwidths and VCs. The ASDM router mainly contains input-output (I/O) buffers, a switching allocator, and a crossbar unit. The 4-phase 1-of-4 dual-rail protocol is used to construct the I/O buffers. The performance of the ASDM router is analyzed in terms of lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTs) (chip area), delay, latency, and throughput parameters. The work is implemented using Verilog-HDL with Xilinx ISE 14.7 on artix-7 FPGA. The ASDM router achieves % chip area and obtains 0.8 ns of latency with a throughput of 800 Mfps. The proposed router is compared with existing asynchronous approaches with improved latency and throughput metrics

A TrustZone-assisted secure silicon on a co-design framework

Dissertação de mestrado em Engenharia Eletrónica Industrial e ComputadoresEmbedded systems were for a long time, single-purpose and closed systems, characterized by hardware resource constraints and real-time requirements. Nowadays, their functionality is ever-growing, coupled with an increasing complexity and heterogeneity. Embedded applications increasingly demand employment of general-purpose operating systems (GPOSs) to handle operator interfaces and general-purpose computing tasks, while simultaneously ensuring the strict timing requirements. Virtualization, which enables multiple operating systems (OSs) to run on top of the same hardware platform, is gaining momentum in the embedded systems arena, driven by the growing interest in consolidating and isolating multiple and heterogeneous environments. The penalties incurred by classic virtualization approaches is pushing research towards hardware-assisted solutions. Among the existing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) technologies for virtualization, ARM TrustZone technology is gaining momentum due to the supremacy and lower cost of TrustZone-enabled processors. Programmable system-on-chips (SoCs) are becoming leading players in the embedded systems space, because the combination of a plethora of hard resources with programmable logic enables the efficient implementation of systems that perfectly fit the heterogeneous nature of embedded applications. Moreover, novel disruptive approaches make use of field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology to enhance virtualization mechanisms. This master’s thesis proposes a hardware-software co-design framework for easing the economy of addressing the new generation of embedded systems requirements. ARM TrustZone is exploited to implement the root-of-trust of a virtualization-based architecture that allows the execution of a GPOS side-by-side with a real-time OS (RTOS). RTOS services were offloaded to hardware, so that it could present simultaneous improvements on performance and determinism. Instead of focusing in a concrete application, the goal is to provide a complete framework, specifically tailored for Zynq-base devices, that developers can use to accelerate a bunch of distinct applications across different embedded industries.Os sistemas embebidos foram, durante muitos anos, sistemas com um simples e único propósito, caracterizados por recursos de hardware limitados e com cariz de tempo real. Hoje em dia, o número de funcionalidades começa a escalar, assim como o grau de complexidade e heterogeneidade. As aplicações embebidas exigem cada vez mais o uso de sistemas operativos (OSs) de uso geral (GPOS) para lidar com interfaces gráficas e tarefas de computação de propósito geral. Porém, os seus requisitos primordiais de tempo real mantém-se. A virtualização permite que vários sistemas operativos sejam executados na mesma plataforma de hardware. Impulsionada pelo crescente interesse em consolidar e isolar ambientes múltiplos e heterogéneos, a virtualização tem ganho uma crescente relevância no domínio dos sistemas embebidos. As adversidades que advém das abordagens de virtualização clássicas estão a direcionar estudos no âmbito de soluções assistidas por hardware. Entre as tecnologias comerciais existentes, a tecnologia ARM TrustZone está a ganhar muita relevância devido à supremacia e ao menor custo dos processadores que suportam esta tecnologia. Plataformas hibridas, que combinam processadores com lógica programável, estão em crescente penetração no domínio dos sistemas embebidos pois, disponibilizam um enorme conjunto de recursos que se adequam perfeitamente à natureza heterogénea dos sistemas atuais. Além disso, existem soluções recentes que fazem uso da tecnologia de FPGA para melhorar os mecanismos de virtualização. Esta dissertação propõe uma framework baseada em hardware-software de modo a cumprir os requisitos da nova geração de sistemas embebidos. A tecnologia TrustZone é explorada para implementar uma arquitetura que permite a execução de um GPOS lado-a-lado com um sistemas operativo de tempo real (RTOS). Os serviços disponibilizados pelo RTOS são migrados para hardware, para melhorar o desempenho e determinismo do OS. Em vez de focar numa aplicação concreta, o objetivo é fornecer uma framework especificamente adaptada para dispositivos baseados em System-on-chips Zynq, de forma a que developers possam usar para acelerar um vasto número de aplicações distintas em diferentes setores