A Template-based Framework for Exploring Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures
Artur Podobas1,2, Kentaro Sano 1 and Satoshi Matsuoka1,3
1 RIKEN Center for Computational Science (R-CCS), Kobe, Japan 2 KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden 3 Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan
Abstract
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures
(CGRAs) are being considered as a complementary addition to
modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. These
reconfigurable devices overcome many of the limitations of the
(more popular) FPGA, by providing higher operating frequency,
denser compute capacity, and lower power consumption. Today,
CGRAs have been used in several embedded applications,
including automobile, telecommunication, and mobile systems,
but the literature on CGRAs in HPC is sparse and the field full
of research opportunities. In this work, we introduce our CGRA
simulator infrastructure for use in evaluating future HPC CGRA
systems. Our CGRA simulator is built on synthesizable VHDL
and is highly parametrizable, including support for connectivity,
SIMD, data-type width, and heterogeneity. Unlike other related
work, our framework supports co-integration with third-party
memory simulators or evaluation of future memory architecture,
which is crucial to reason around memory-bound applications.
We demonstrate how our framework can be used to explore the
performance of multiple different kernels, showing the impact
of different configuration and design-space options.
[The authors opted for not publicly sharing a presentation video.]