A practical FPGA-based framework for novel CMP research

Chip-multiprocessors are quickly gaining momentum in all segments of computing. However, the practical success of CMPs strongly depends on addressing the difficulty of multithreaded application development. To address this challenge, it is necessary to co-develop new CMP architecture with novel programming models. Currently, architecture research relies on software simulators which are too slow to facilitate interesting experiments with CMP software without using small datasets or significantly reducing the level of detail in the simulated models. An alternative to simulation is to exploit the rich capabilities of modern FPGAs to create FPGA-based platforms for novel CMP research. This paper presents ATLAS, the first prototype for CMPs with hardware support for Transactional Memory (TM), a technology aiming to simplify parallel programming. ATLAS uses the BEE2 multi-FPGA board to provide a system with 8 PowerPC cores that run at 100MHz and runs Linux. ATLAS provides significant ben...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: FPGA
• Authors: Sewook Wee, Jared Casper, Njuguna Njoroge, Yuriy Teslyar, Daxia Ge, Christos Kozyrakis, Kunle Olukotun
• Keywords: ASIC-style CMP RTL, CMP Research, CMP Software, FPGA 2007, Hardware