Hardware prototyping of novel invasive multicore architectures

The sustained advance in technology will enable integrating hundreds of processing cores on a single die in near future. However, it already can be foreseen that the management of the resources of such large systems will not scale in the same way as the hardware using todays entirely software based and centralized management approaches. The invasive paradigm addresses this problem and proposes concepts to enable resource awareness and scalability - especially focusing the resource management perspective - in future multicore systems. These concepts are based on distributed and software-hardware partitioned resource management strategies. High level management decision that are made by software thereby trigger lower level management strategies that are autonomously carried out in hardware. Sufficiently accurate modeling of the overall invasive system is required to study and optimize such a decentralized, software-hardware partitioned control loop where decisions significantly depend on runtime dynamic effects. Software based simulation cannot deliver the required speed or accuracy making FPGA based prototyping of invasive systems necessary. This paper describes our prototyping concepts and discusses possible implementation alternatives for invasive multicore architectures.