453 research outputs found

    The AXIOM software layers

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    AXIOM project aims at developing a heterogeneous computing board (SMP-FPGA).The Software Layers developed at the AXIOM project are explained.OmpSs provides an easy way to execute heterogeneous codes in multiple cores. People and objects will soon share the same digital network for information exchange in a world named as the age of the cyber-physical systems. The general expectation is that people and systems will interact in real-time. This poses pressure onto systems design to support increasing demands on computational power, while keeping a low power envelop. Additionally, modular scaling and easy programmability are also important to ensure these systems to become widespread. The whole set of expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed.The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) will research new hardware/software architectures for cyber-physical systems to meet such expectations. The technical approach aims at solving fundamental problems to enable easy programmability of heterogeneous multi-core multi-board systems. AXIOM proposes the use of the task-based OmpSs programming model, leveraging low-level communication interfaces provided by the hardware. Modular scalability will be possible thanks to a fast interconnect embedded into each module. To this aim, an innovative ARM and FPGA-based board will be designed, with enhanced capabilities for interfacing with the physical world. Its effectiveness will be demonstrated with key scenarios such as Smart Video-Surveillance and Smart Living/Home (domotics).Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    LEGaTO: first steps towards energy-efficient toolset for heterogeneous computing

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    LEGaTO is a three-year EU H2020 project which started in December 2017. The LEGaTO project will leverage task-based programming models to provide a software ecosystem for Made-in-Europe heterogeneous hardware composed of CPUs, GPUs, FPGAs and dataflow engines. The aim is to attain one order of magnitude energy savings from the edge to the converged cloud/HPC.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    Design and resource management of reconfigurable multiprocessors for data-parallel applications

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    FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array)-based custom reconfigurable computing machines have established themselves as low-cost and low-risk alternatives to ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) implementations and general-purpose microprocessors in accelerating a wide range of computation-intensive applications. Most often they are Application Specific Programmable Circuiits (ASPCs), which are developer programmable instead of user programmable. The major disadvantages of ASPCs are minimal programmability, and significant time and energy overheads caused by required hardware reconfiguration when the problem size outnumbers the available reconfigurable resources; these problems are expected to become more serious with increases in the FPGA chip size. On the other hand, dominant high-performance computing systems, such as PC clusters and SMPs (Symmetric Multiprocessors), suffer from high communication latencies and/or scalability problems. This research introduces low-cost, user-programmable and reconfigurable MultiProcessor-on-a-Programmable-Chip (MPoPC) systems for high-performance, low-cost computing. It also proposes a relevant resource management framework that deals with performance, power consumption and energy issues. These semi-customized systems reduce significantly runtime device reconfiguration by employing userprogrammable processing elements that are reusable for different tasks in large, complex applications. For the sake of illustration, two different types of MPoPCs with hardware FPUs (floating-point units) are designed and implemented for credible performance evaluation and modeling: the coarse-grain MIMD (Multiple-Instruction, Multiple-Data) CG-MPoPC machine based on a processor IP (Intellectual Property) core and the mixed-mode (MIMD, SIMD or M-SIMD) variant-grain HERA (HEterogeneous Reconfigurable Architecture) machine. In addition to alleviating the above difficulties, MPoPCs can offer several performance and energy advantages to our data-parallel applications when compared to ASPCs; they are simpler and more scalable, and have less verification time and cost. Various common computation-intensive benchmark algorithms, such as matrix-matrix multiplication (MMM) and LU factorization, are studied and their parallel solutions are shown for the two MPoPCs. The performance is evaluated with large sparse real-world matrices primarily from power engineering. We expect even further performance gains on MPoPCs in the near future by employing ever improving FPGAs. The innovative nature of this work has the potential to guide research in this arising field of high-performance, low-cost reconfigurable computing. The largest advantage of reconfigurable logic lies in its large degree of hardware customization and reconfiguration which allows reusing the resources to match the computation and communication needs of applications. Therefore, a major effort in the presented design methodology for mixed-mode MPoPCs, like HERA, is devoted to effective resource management. A two-phase approach is applied. A mixed-mode weighted Task Flow Graph (w-TFG) is first constructed for any given application, where tasks are classified according to their most appropriate computing mode (e.g., SIMD or MIMD). At compile time, an architecture is customized and synthesized for the TFG using an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation and a parameterized hardware component library. Various run-time scheduling schemes with different performanceenergy objectives are proposed. A system-level energy model for HERA, which is based on low-level implementation data and run-time statistics, is proposed to guide performance-energy trade-off decisions. A parallel power flow analysis technique based on Newton\u27s method is proposed and employed to verify the methodology

    Performance and area evaluations of processor-based benchmarks on FPGA devices

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    The computing system on SoCs is being long-term research since the FPGA technology has emerged due to its personality of re-programmable fabric, reconfigurable computing, and fast development time to market. During the last decade, uni-processor in a SoC is no longer to deal with the high growing market for complex applications such as Mobile Phones audio and video encoding, image and network processing. Due to the number of transistors on a silicon wafer is increasing, the recent FPGAs or embedded systems are advancing toward multi-processor-based design to meet tremendous performance and benefit this kind of systems are possible. Therefore, is an upcoming age of the MPSoC. In addition, most of the embedded processors are soft-cores, because they are flexible and reconfigurable for specific software functions and easy to build homogenous multi-processor systems for parallel programming. Moreover, behavioural synthesis tools are becoming a lot more powerful and enable to create datapath of logic units from high-level algorithms such as C to HDL and available for partitioning a HW/SW concurrent methodology. A range of embedded processors is able to implement on a FPGA-based prototyping to integrate the CPUs on a programmable device. This research is, firstly represent different types of computer architectures in modern embedded processors that are followed in different type of software applications (eg. Multi-threading Operations or Complex Functions) on FPGA-based SoCs; and secondly investigate their capability by executing a wide-range of multimedia software codes (Integer-algometric only) in different models of the processor-systems (uni-processor or multi-processor or Co-design), and finally compare those results in terms of the benchmarks and resource utilizations within FPGAs. All the examined programs were written in standard C and executed in a variety numbers of soft-core processors or hardware units to obtain the execution times. However, the number of processors and their customizable configuration or hardware datapath being generated are limited by a target FPGA resource, and designers need to understand the FPGA-based tradeoffs that have been considered - Speed versus Area. For this experimental purpose, I defined benchmarks into DLP / HLS catalogues, which are "data" and "function" intensive respectively. The programs of DLP will be executed in LEON3 MP and LE1 CMP multi-processor systems and the programs of HLS in the LegUp Co-design system on target FPGAs. In preliminary, the performance of the soft-core processors will be examined by executing all the benchmarks. The whole story of this thesis work centres on the issue of the execute times or the speed-up and area breakdown on FPGA devices in terms of different programs

    The AXIOM platform for next-generation cyber physical systems

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    Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs) are widely used in many applications that require interactions between humans and their physical environment. These systems usually integrate a set of hardware-software components for optimal application execution in terms of performance and energy consumption. The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module), presented in this paper, proposes a hardware-software platform for CPS coupled with an easy parallel programming model and sufficient connectivity so that the performance can scale-up by adding multiple boards. AXIOM supports a task-based programming model based on OmpSs and leverages a high-speed, inexpensive communication interface called AXIOM-Link. The board also tightly couples the CPU with reconfigurable resources to accelerate portions of the applications. As case studies, AXIOM uses smart video surveillance, and smart home living applicationsThis work is partially supported by the European Union H2020 program through the AXIOM project (grant ICT-01-2014 GA 645496) and HiPEAC (GA 687698), by the Spanish Government through Programa Severo Ochoa (SEV-2015-0493), by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology through TIN2015-65316-P project, and by the Generalitat de Catalunya (contracts 2014-SGR-1051 and 2014-SGR-1272). We also thank the Xilinx University Program for its hardware and software donations.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

    PYDAC: A DISTRIBUTED RUNTIME SYSTEM AND PROGRAMMING MODEL FOR A HETEROGENEOUS MANY-CORE ARCHITECTURE

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    Heterogeneous many-core architectures that consist of big, fast cores and small, energy-efficient cores are very promising for future high-performance computing (HPC) systems. These architectures offer a good balance between single-threaded perfor- mance and multithreaded throughput. Such systems impose challenges on the design of programming model and runtime system. Specifically, these challenges include (a) how to fully utilize the chip’s performance, (b) how to manage heterogeneous, un- reliable hardware resources, and (c) how to generate and manage a large amount of parallel tasks. This dissertation proposes and evaluates a Python-based programming framework called PyDac. PyDac supports a two-level programming model. At the high level, a programmer creates a very large number of tasks, using the divide-and-conquer strategy. At the low level, tasks are written in imperative programming style. The runtime system seamlessly manages the parallel tasks, system resilience, and inter- task communication with architecture support. PyDac has been implemented on both an field-programmable gate array (FPGA) emulation of an unconventional het- erogeneous architecture and a conventional multicore microprocessor. To evaluate the performance, resilience, and programmability of the proposed system, several micro-benchmarks were developed. We found that (a) the PyDac abstracts away task communication and achieves programmability, (b) the micro-benchmarks are scalable on the hardware prototype, but (predictably) serial operation limits some micro-benchmarks, and (c) the degree of protection versus speed could be varied in redundant threading that is transparent to programmers

    Hardware runtime management for task-based programming models

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    Task-based programming models allow programmers to express applications as a collection of tasks with dependences. They are simple to use and greatly improve programmability by using software runtimes to exploit task parallelism and heterogeneity over multi-core, many-core and heterogeneous platforms. In these programming models, the runtimes guarantee correct execution order by managing tasks using task-dependence graphs (TDGs). These runtimes are powerful enough to provide high performance with coarse-grained tasks although they impose overheads on the application execution to maintain all the information they need to do their work. However, as the current trend in processor architectures keeps including more cores and heterogeneity (in fact complexity) in the systems, coarse-grained parallelism is not enough to feed all the underlying resources. Instead, fine-grained tasks are preferable as they are able to expose higher parallelism in applications but the overheads introduced by the software runtimes under these conditions prevent an efficient exploitation of fine-grained parallelism. The two most critical runtime overheads are task dependence graph management and task scheduling to heterogeneous systems. We propose a hardware architecture Picos, consisting of a hardware task dependence manager including nested task support, and a heterogeneous task scheduler, to accelerate the critical runtime functions for task-based programming models. With Picos, we aim at extending the benefit of these programming models into exploiting fine-grained task parallelism and heterogeneity. As a proof-of-concept, Three prototypes of Picos have been designed in VHDL and implemented in a System-on-chip platform consisting of regular ARM SMP cores and an integrated FPGA. They also have been analyzed with real benchmarks with OmpSs running and Linux on the platform. The first prototype is a hardware task dependence manager, which has been implemented in a Xilinx Zynq 7000 series SoCs. It is connected to a 2-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, with bare-metal OS integration. With 24 simulated workers, and running real task-dependence analysis in Picos, it scales up to 21x speedup. The second prototype Picos++ extended Picos with an exciting new feature for nested task support in hardware. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a feature has been support fully in hardware task dependence managers. This prototype is fully integrated in not only hardware, but also with a State-of-the-Art parallel programming model, and with Linux. The third prototype includes both a hardware task dependence manager and a heterogeneous task scheduler. The heterogeneous task scheduler receives ready tasks from the task-dependence manager and then schedule them to hardware execution units that have the estimated earliest finish time. It is implemented in a Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC chip. In a system with 4 threads and up to 15 HW accelerators, it achieves up to 16.2x speedup for real benchmarks, and saves up to 90% of energy.Los modelos de programación basados en tareas permiten a los programadores expresar las aplicaciones como una colección de tareas con dependencias entre ellas. Dichos modelos son simples de usar y mejoran enormemente la programabilidad. Para ello se valen del uso de una runtime que en tiempo de ejecución ayuda a explotar el paralelismo de las tareas cuando se ejecutan en plataformas multi-cores, many-cores y heterogéneas. En estos modelos de programación los runtimes garantizan la ejecución de las tareas en el orden correcto mediante el uso de gráficos de dependencias entre tareas (TDG). Actualmente, los runtimes son lo suficientemente potentes para proporcionar un alto rendimiento con tareas de granularidad gruesa a pesar de que para mantener toda la información que necesitan para hacer su trabajo, introducen un sobrecoste importante en la ejecución de las aplicaciones. El problema viene dado por la tendencia actual en arquitectura de computadores a seguir incluyendo más núcleos y heterogeneidad (de hecho, complejidad) en los sistemas de procesado con lo que el paralelismo de granularidad gruesa no es suficiente para alimentar todos los recursos. En estos entornos complejos las tareas de granularidad fina son preferibles ya que son capaces de exponer un mayor paralelismo de las aplicaciones. Sin embargo, con tareas de granularidad fina, los sobrecostes introducidos por los runtimes software son mayores debido a la necesidad de manejar muchas más tareas más rápido. En general los mayores sobrecostes introducidos por los runtimes son: la administración de los grafos de dependencias que relacionan las tareas y la gestión de las tareas en sistemas heterogéneos. Proponemos una arquitectura hardware, llamada Picos, que consiste en un administrador de dependencias entre tareas incluyendo soporte para tareas anidadas y planificación de tareas heterogéneas. La función principal de dicha arquitectura es acelerar las funciones críticas de los runtimes para modelos de programación basados en tareas. Con Picos, se pretende extender el beneficio de estos modelos de programación para explotar el paralelismo y la heterogeneidad ejecutando tareas de granularidad fina. Como prueba de concepto, tres prototipos de Picos han sido diseñado en VHDL e implementado en una plataforma System-on-chip que consta de varios núcleos ARM integrados junto con una FPGA, y ademas analizados con ejecuciones reales con OmpSs y con Linux. El primer prototipo es un administrador hardware de tareas con dependencias, que se ha implementado en un SoC Xilinx Zynq serie 7000. Está conectado a un procesador ARM Cortex A9 de 2 núcleos, e integrado con el SO. Con 24 núcleos simulados y realizando el análisis real de las dependencias entre tareas en Picos, obtiene hasta un 21x sobre las mismas ejecuciones usando el entorno software. El segundo prototipo, Picos++, amplió Picos incorporando el soporte para la gestión de tareas anidadas en hardware. Hasta donde llega nuestro conocimiento, esta es la primera vez que dicha característica ha sido propuesta y/o incorporada en un administrador hardware de dependencias entre tareas. El segundo prototipo está completamente integrado en el sistema, no solo en hardware, sino también con el modelo de programación paralelo y con el sistema operativo. El tercer prototipo, incluye un administrador y planificador de tareas heterogéneas. El planificador de tareas heterogéneas recibe dichas tareas listas del administrador de dependencias entre tareas y las programa en la unidad de ejecución de hardware adecuada que tenga el tiempo de finalización estimado más corto. Este prototipo se ha implementado en un chip MPSoC Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+. En dicho sistema con cuatro núcleos ARM y hasta 15 aceleradores HW funcionales, logra una aceleración de hasta 16.2x, y ahorra hasta el 90% de la energía con respecto al software.Postprint (published version

    Hardware runtime management for task-based programming models

    Get PDF
    Task-based programming models allow programmers to express applications as a collection of tasks with dependences. They are simple to use and greatly improve programmability by using software runtimes to exploit task parallelism and heterogeneity over multi-core, many-core and heterogeneous platforms. In these programming models, the runtimes guarantee correct execution order by managing tasks using task-dependence graphs (TDGs). These runtimes are powerful enough to provide high performance with coarse-grained tasks although they impose overheads on the application execution to maintain all the information they need to do their work. However, as the current trend in processor architectures keeps including more cores and heterogeneity (in fact complexity) in the systems, coarse-grained parallelism is not enough to feed all the underlying resources. Instead, fine-grained tasks are preferable as they are able to expose higher parallelism in applications but the overheads introduced by the software runtimes under these conditions prevent an efficient exploitation of fine-grained parallelism. The two most critical runtime overheads are task dependence graph management and task scheduling to heterogeneous systems. We propose a hardware architecture Picos, consisting of a hardware task dependence manager including nested task support, and a heterogeneous task scheduler, to accelerate the critical runtime functions for task-based programming models. With Picos, we aim at extending the benefit of these programming models into exploiting fine-grained task parallelism and heterogeneity. As a proof-of-concept, Three prototypes of Picos have been designed in VHDL and implemented in a System-on-chip platform consisting of regular ARM SMP cores and an integrated FPGA. They also have been analyzed with real benchmarks with OmpSs running and Linux on the platform. The first prototype is a hardware task dependence manager, which has been implemented in a Xilinx Zynq 7000 series SoCs. It is connected to a 2-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, with bare-metal OS integration. With 24 simulated workers, and running real task-dependence analysis in Picos, it scales up to 21x speedup. The second prototype Picos++ extended Picos with an exciting new feature for nested task support in hardware. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that such a feature has been support fully in hardware task dependence managers. This prototype is fully integrated in not only hardware, but also with a State-of-the-Art parallel programming model, and with Linux. The third prototype includes both a hardware task dependence manager and a heterogeneous task scheduler. The heterogeneous task scheduler receives ready tasks from the task-dependence manager and then schedule them to hardware execution units that have the estimated earliest finish time. It is implemented in a Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+ MPSoC chip. In a system with 4 threads and up to 15 HW accelerators, it achieves up to 16.2x speedup for real benchmarks, and saves up to 90% of energy.Los modelos de programación basados en tareas permiten a los programadores expresar las aplicaciones como una colección de tareas con dependencias entre ellas. Dichos modelos son simples de usar y mejoran enormemente la programabilidad. Para ello se valen del uso de una runtime que en tiempo de ejecución ayuda a explotar el paralelismo de las tareas cuando se ejecutan en plataformas multi-cores, many-cores y heterogéneas. En estos modelos de programación los runtimes garantizan la ejecución de las tareas en el orden correcto mediante el uso de gráficos de dependencias entre tareas (TDG). Actualmente, los runtimes son lo suficientemente potentes para proporcionar un alto rendimiento con tareas de granularidad gruesa a pesar de que para mantener toda la información que necesitan para hacer su trabajo, introducen un sobrecoste importante en la ejecución de las aplicaciones. El problema viene dado por la tendencia actual en arquitectura de computadores a seguir incluyendo más núcleos y heterogeneidad (de hecho, complejidad) en los sistemas de procesado con lo que el paralelismo de granularidad gruesa no es suficiente para alimentar todos los recursos. En estos entornos complejos las tareas de granularidad fina son preferibles ya que son capaces de exponer un mayor paralelismo de las aplicaciones. Sin embargo, con tareas de granularidad fina, los sobrecostes introducidos por los runtimes software son mayores debido a la necesidad de manejar muchas más tareas más rápido. En general los mayores sobrecostes introducidos por los runtimes son: la administración de los grafos de dependencias que relacionan las tareas y la gestión de las tareas en sistemas heterogéneos. Proponemos una arquitectura hardware, llamada Picos, que consiste en un administrador de dependencias entre tareas incluyendo soporte para tareas anidadas y planificación de tareas heterogéneas. La función principal de dicha arquitectura es acelerar las funciones críticas de los runtimes para modelos de programación basados en tareas. Con Picos, se pretende extender el beneficio de estos modelos de programación para explotar el paralelismo y la heterogeneidad ejecutando tareas de granularidad fina. Como prueba de concepto, tres prototipos de Picos han sido diseñado en VHDL e implementado en una plataforma System-on-chip que consta de varios núcleos ARM integrados junto con una FPGA, y ademas analizados con ejecuciones reales con OmpSs y con Linux. El primer prototipo es un administrador hardware de tareas con dependencias, que se ha implementado en un SoC Xilinx Zynq serie 7000. Está conectado a un procesador ARM Cortex A9 de 2 núcleos, e integrado con el SO. Con 24 núcleos simulados y realizando el análisis real de las dependencias entre tareas en Picos, obtiene hasta un 21x sobre las mismas ejecuciones usando el entorno software. El segundo prototipo, Picos++, amplió Picos incorporando el soporte para la gestión de tareas anidadas en hardware. Hasta donde llega nuestro conocimiento, esta es la primera vez que dicha característica ha sido propuesta y/o incorporada en un administrador hardware de dependencias entre tareas. El segundo prototipo está completamente integrado en el sistema, no solo en hardware, sino también con el modelo de programación paralelo y con el sistema operativo. El tercer prototipo, incluye un administrador y planificador de tareas heterogéneas. El planificador de tareas heterogéneas recibe dichas tareas listas del administrador de dependencias entre tareas y las programa en la unidad de ejecución de hardware adecuada que tenga el tiempo de finalización estimado más corto. Este prototipo se ha implementado en un chip MPSoC Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale+. En dicho sistema con cuatro núcleos ARM y hasta 15 aceleradores HW funcionales, logra una aceleración de hasta 16.2x, y ahorra hasta el 90% de la energía con respecto al software

    The AXIOM Software Layers

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    25siopenPeople and objects will soon share the same digital network for information exchange in a world named as the age of the cyber-physical systems. The general expectation is that people and systems will interact in real-time. This poses pressure onto systems design to support increasing demands on computational power, while keeping a low power envelop. Additionally, modular scaling and easy programmability are also important to ensure these systems to become widespread. The whole set of expectations impose scientific and technological challenges that need to be properly addressed. The AXIOM project (Agile, eXtensible, fast I/O Module) will research new hardware/software architectures for cyber-physical systems to meet such expectations. The technical approach aims at solving fundamental problems to enable easy programmability of heterogeneous multi-core multi-board systems. AXIOM proposes the use of the task-based OmpSs programming model, leveraging low-level communication interfaces provided by the hardware. Modular scalability will be possible thanks to a fast interconnect embedded into each module. To this aim, an innovative ARM and FPGA-based board will be designed, with enhanced capabilities for interfacing with the physical world. Its effectiveness will be demonstrated with key scenarios such as Smart Video-Surveillance and Smart Living/Home (domotics).openAlvarez, C.; Ayguade, E.; Bosch, J.; Bueno, J.; Cherkashin, A.; Filgueras, A.; Jiminez-Gonzalez, D.; Martorell, X.; Navarro, N.; Vidal, M.; Theodoropoulos, D.; Pnevmatikatos, D.; Catani, D.; Oro, D.; Fernandez, C.; Segura, C.; Rodriguez, J.; Hernando, J.; Scordino, C.; Gai, P.; Passera, P.; Pomella, A.; Bettin, N.; Rizzo, A.; Giorgi, R.Alvarez, C.; Ayguade, E.; Bosch, J.; Bueno, J.; Cherkashin, A.; Filgueras, A.; Jiminez-Gonzalez, D.; Martorell, X.; Navarro, N.; Vidal, M.; Theodoropoulos, D.; Pnevmatikatos, D.; Catani, D.; Oro, D.; Fernandez, C.; Segura, C.; Rodriguez, J.; Hernando, J.; Scordino, C.; Gai, P.; Passera, P.; Pomella, A.; Bettin, N.; Rizzo, A.; Giorgi, R
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