A Message-Passing Hardware/Software Co-simulation Environment to Aid in Reconfigurable Computing Design Using TMD-MPI

High-performance reconfigurable computers (HPRC) provide a mix of standard processors and FPGAs to collectively accelerate applications. This introduces new design challenges, such as the need for portable programming models across HPRCs, and system-level verification tools. In this paper, we extend previous work on TMD-MPI to include an MPI-based approach to exchange data between X86 processors and hardware engines inside FPGAs that improves design portability by hiding vendor-specific communication details. Also, we have created a tool called the message-passing simulation framework (MSF) that we use to develop TMD-MPI itself as well as an application development tool that enables an FPGA in simulation to exchange messages with other X86 processors. As an example, we simulate a LINPACK benchmark hardware core using an Intel-FSB-FPGA platform to quickly prototype the hardware, to test the communications and to verify the benchmark results.