Title :
Application Specific Customization and Scalability of Soft Multiprocessors
Author :
Unnikrishnan, Deepak ; Zhao, Jia ; Tessier, Russell
Author_Institution :
Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA, USA
Abstract :
Although soft microprocessors are widely used in FPGAs, limited work has been performed regarding how to automatically and efficiently generate soft multiprocessors. In this paper, an automated parallel compilation environment for multiple soft processors which incorporates parallel compilation and inter-processor communication structures is described. A total of eight previously-developed parallel processing benchmarks have been automatically mapped to a varying number of synthesized soft microprocessors in commercial FPGAs. The new automated infrastructure allows for an evaluation of area, performance, and power tradeoffs for a range of architectural choices. Experiments show that our soft-multiprocessor systems consisting of up to 16 processors can offer up to 5× improvement in application performance against their uniprocessor counterparts.
Keywords :
application specific integrated circuits; field programmable gate arrays; parallel processing; program compilers; FPGA; application specific customization; automated parallel compilation environment; inter-processor communication structures; parallel processing benchmarks; soft multiprocessor systems; system-on-a-programmable chip; Application software; Energy consumption; Field programmable gate arrays; Microprocessors; Network synthesis; Network topology; Network-on-a-chip; Parallel processing; Scalability; Throughput; FPGA; application specific customization; architectural evaluation; automatic compilation; soft multiprocessor;
Conference_Titel :
Field Programmable Custom Computing Machines, 2009. FCCM '09. 17th IEEE Symposium on
Conference_Location :
Napa, CA
Print_ISBN :
978-0-7695-3716-0
DOI :
10.1109/FCCM.2009.41
