Application-Specific Signatures for Transactional Memory in Soft Processors

As reconfigurable computing hardware and in particular FPGA-based systems-on-chip comprise an increasing number of processor and accelerator cores, supporting sharing and synchronization in a way that is scalable and easy to program becomes a challenge. Transactional memory (TM) is a potential solution to this problem, and an FPGA-based system provides the opportunity to support TM in hardware (HTM). Although there are many proposed approaches to HTM support for ASICs, these do not necessarily map well to FPGAs. In particular in this work we demonstrate that while signature-based conflict detection schemes (essentially bit vectors) should intuitively be a good match to the bit-parallelism of FPGAs, previous schemes result in either unacceptable multicycle stalls, operating frequencies, or falseconflict rates. Capitalizing on the reconfigurable nature of FPGA-based systems, we propose an application-specific signature mechanism for HTM conflict detection. Using both real and projected F...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ARC
• Authors: Martin Labrecque, Mark Jeffrey, J. Gregory Steffan
• Keywords: ARC 2010, Conflict Detection, FPGA-based Soft Multiprocessor, Hardware, Particular Fpga-based Systems-on-chip