| 1. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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A Configurable Two Dimensional Mesh Network-on-Chip Implementation in Chisel
- 2019
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- On-chip communication plays a significant role in the performance of manycore architectures. Therefore, they require a proper on-chip communication infrastructure that can scale with the number of the cores. As a solution, network-on-chip structures have emerged and are being used.This paper presents description of a two dimensional mesh network-on-chip router and a network interface, which are implemented in Chisel to be integrated to the rocket chip generator that generates RISC-V (rocket) cores. The router is implemented in VHDL as well and the two implementations are verified and compared.Hardware resource usage and performance of different sized networks are analyzed. The implementations are synthesized for a Xilinx Ultrascale FPGA via Xilinx tools for the hardware resource usage and clock frequency results. The performance results including latency and throughput measurements with different traffic patterns, are collected with cycle accurate emulations. The implementations in Chisel and VHDL do not show a significant difference. Chisel requires around 10% fewer lines of code, however, the difference in the synthesis results is negligible. Our latency result are better than the majority of the other studies. The other results such as hardware usage, clock frequency, and throughput are competitive when compared to the related works.
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| 2. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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A framework to generate domain-specific manycore architectures from dataflow programs
- 2020
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Ingår i: Microprocessors and microsystems. - Amsterdam : Elsevier. - 0141-9331 .- 1872-9436. ; 72
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the last 15 years we have seen, as a response to power and thermal limits for current chip technologies, an explosion in the use of multiple and even many computer cores on a single chip. But now, to further improve performance and energy efficiency, when there are potentially hundreds of computing cores on a chip, we see a need for a specialization of individual cores and the development of heterogeneous manycore computer architectures.However, developing such heterogeneous architectures is a significant challenge. Therefore, we propose a design method to generate domain specific manycore architectures based on RISC-V instruction set architecture and automate the main steps of this method with software tools. The design method allows generation of manycore architectures with different configurations including core augmentation through instruction extensions and custom accelerators. The method starts from developing applications in a high-level dataflow language and ends by generating synthesizable Verilog code and cycle accurate emulator for the generated architecture.We evaluate the design method and the software tools by generating several architectures specialized for two different applications and measure their performance and hardware resource usages. Our results show that the design method can be used to generate specialized manycore architectures targeting applications from different domains. The specialized architectures show at least 3 to 4 times better performance than the general purpose counterparts. In certain cases, replacing general purpose components with specialized components saves hardware resources. Automating the method increases the speed of architecture development and facilitates the design space exploration of manycore architectures.
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| 3. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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An Evaluation of Code Generation of Dataflow Languages on Manycore Architectures
- 2014
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Ingår i: RTCSA 2014. - Piscataway, NJ : IEEE Press.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Today computer architectures are shifting from single core to manycores due to several reasons such as performance demands, power and heat limitations. However, shifting to manycores results in additional complexities, especially with regard to efficient development of applications. Hence there is a need to raise the abstraction level of development techniques for the manycores while exposing the inherent parallelism in the applications. One promising class of programming languages is dataflow languages and in this paper we evaluate and optimize the code generation for one such language, CAL. We have also developed a communication library to support the inter-core communication.The code generation can target multiple architectures, but the results presented in this paper is focused on Adapteva's many core architecture Epiphany.We use the two-dimensional inverse discrete cosine transform (2D-IDCT) as our benchmark and compare our code generation from CAL with a hand-written implementation developed in C. Several optimizations in the code generation as well as in the communication library are described, and we have observed that the most critical optimization is reducing the number of external memory accesses. Combining all optimizations we have been able to reduce the difference in execution time between auto-generated and hand-written implementations from a factor of 4.3x down to a factor of only 1.3x. ©2014 IEEE.
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| 4. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Dataflow Implementation of QR Decomposition on a Manycore
- 2016
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Ingår i: MES '16. - New York, NY : ACM Press. - 9781450342629 ; , s. 26-30
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- While parallel computer architectures have become mainstream, application development on them is still challenging. There is a need for new tools, languages and programming models. Additionally, there is a lack of knowledge about the performance of parallel approaches of basic but important operations, such as the QR decomposition of a matrix, on current commercial manycore architectures.This paper evaluates a high level dataflow language (CAL), a source-to-source compiler (Cal2Many) and three QR decomposition algorithms (Givens Rotations, Householder and Gram-Schmidt). The algorithms are implemented both in CAL and hand-optimized C languages, executed on Adapteva's Epiphany manycore architecture and evaluated with respect to performance, scalability and development effort.The performance of the CAL (generated C) implementations gets as good as 2\% slower than the hand-written versions. They require an average of 25\% fewer lines of source code without significantly increasing the binary size. Development effort is reduced and debugging is significantly simplified. The implementations executed on Epiphany cores outperform the GNU scientific library on the host ARM processor of the Parallella board by up to 30x. © 2016 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).
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| 5. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Designing Domain-Specific Heterogeneous Architectures from Dataflow Programs
- 2018
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Ingår i: Computers. - Basel : MDPI AG. - 2073-431X. ; 7:2
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The last ten years have seen performance and power requirements pushing computer architectures using only a single core towards so-called manycore systems with hundreds of cores on a single chip. To further increase performance and energy efficiency, we are now seeing the development of heterogeneous architectures with specialized and accelerated cores. However, designing these heterogeneous systems is a challenging task due to their inherent complexity. We proposed an approach for designing domain-specific heterogeneous architectures based on instruction augmentation through the integration of hardware accelerators into simple cores. These hardware accelerators were determined based on their common use among applications within a certain domain.The objective was to generate heterogeneous architectures by integrating many of these accelerated cores and connecting them with a network-on-chip. The proposed approach aimed to ease the design of heterogeneous manycore architectures—and, consequently, exploration of the design space—by automating the design steps. To evaluate our approach, we enhanced our software tool chain with a tool that can generate accelerated cores from dataflow programs. This new tool chain was evaluated with the aid of two use cases: radar signal processing and mobile baseband processing. We could achieve an approximately 4x improvement in performance, while executing complete applications on the augmented cores with a small impact (2.5–13%) on area usage. The generated accelerators are competitive, achieving more than 90% of the performance of hand-written implementations.
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| 6. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Designing Domain Specific Heterogeneous Manycore Architectures Based on Building Blocks
- 2018
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Performance and power requirements has pushed computer architectures from single core to manycores. These requirements now continue pushing the manycores with identical cores (homogeneous) to manycores with specialized cores (heterogeneous). However designing heterogeneous manycores is a challenging task due to the complexity of the architectures. We propose an approach for designing domain specific heterogeneous manycore architectures based on building blocks. These blocks are defined as the common computations of the applications within a domain. The objective is to generate heterogeneous architectures by integrating many of these blocks to many simple cores and connect the cores with a networkon-chip. The proposed approach aims to ease the design of heterogeneous manycore architectures and facilitate usage of dark silicon concept. As a case study, we develop an accelerator based on several building blocks, integrate it to a RISC core and synthesize on a Xilinx Ultrascale FPGA. The results show that executing a hot-spot of an application on an accelerator based on building blocks increases the performance by 15x, with room for further improvement. The area usage increases as well, however there are potential optimizations to reduce the area usage. © 2018 by the authors
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| 7. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
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Efficient Single-Precision Floating-Point Division Using Harmonized Parabolic Synthesis
- 2017
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Ingår i: 2017 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI. - Los Alamitos : IEEE. - 9781509067626 - 9781509067633
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper proposes a novel method for performing division on floating-point numbers represented in IEEE-754 single-precision (binary32) format. The method is based on an inverter, implemented as a combination of Parabolic Synthesis and second-degree interpolation, followed by a multiplier. It is implemented with and without pipeline stages individually and synthesized while targeting a Xilinx Ultrascale FPGA.The implementations show better resource usage and latency results when compared to other implementations based on different methods. In case of throughput, the proposed method outperforms most of the other works, however, some Altera FPGAs achieve higher clock rate due to the differences in the DSP slice multiplier design.Due to the small size, low latency and high throughput, the presented floating-point division unit is suitable for high performance embedded systems and can be integrated into accelerators or be used as a stand-alone accelerator.
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| 8. |
- Savas, Suleyman, et al.
(författare)
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Generating hardware and software for RISC-V cores generated with Rocket Chip generator
- 2021
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Ingår i: Proceedings - 34th IEEE International System-on-Chip Conference, SOCC 2021. - 2164-1676 .- 2164-1706. - 9781665429313 ; 2021-September, s. 89-94
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper presents the hardware/software generation backend of a code generation framework. The backend aims at synthesizing complete systems based on RISC-V cores with accelerators from a single-language description. The framework takes the dataflow description of an algorithm as input and generates a combination of hardware (in Chisel) and software (in C) that interacts with the hardware. The hardware can be integrated with RISC-V cores created by the Rocket Chip generator and the software can be executed on these cores.The generated hardware requires similar amount of resources as the hand-written hardware while achieving equal or higher clock rates. As expected, the accelerators perform the calculations faster than the general purpose processor, 5 to 33x in our experiments. When these accelerators are integrated with the Rocket cores, they increase the performance by 25% and 260% in the two use-cases we investigate.
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| 9. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-
(författare)
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Hardware/Software Co-Design of Heterogeneous Manycore Architectures
- 2019
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the era of big data, advanced sensing, and artificial intelligence, the required computation power is provided mostly by multicore and manycore architectures. However, the performance demand keeps growing. Thus the computer architectures need to continue evolving and provide higher performance. The applications, which are executed on the manycore architectures, are divided into several tasks to be mapped on separate cores and executed in parallel. Usually these tasks are not identical and may be executed more efficiently on different types of cores within a heterogeneous architecture. Therefore, we believe that the heterogeneous manycores are the next step for the computer architectures. However, there is a lack of knowledge on what form of heterogeneity is the best match for a given application or application domain. This knowledge can be acquired through designing these architectures and testing different design configurations. However, designing these architectures is a great challenge. Therefore, there is a need for an automated design method to facilitate the architecture design and design space exploration to gather knowledge on architectures with different configurations. Additionally, it is already difficult to program manycore architectures efficiently and this difficulty will only increase further with the introduction of heterogeneity due to the increase in the complexity of the architectures, unless this complexity is somehow hidden. There is a need for software development tools to facilitate the software development for these architectures and enable portability of the same software across different manycore platforms.In this thesis, we first address the challenges of the software development for manycore architectures. We evaluate a dataflow language (CAL) and a source-to-source compilation framework (Cal2Many) with several case studies in order to reveal their impact on productivity and performance of the software. The language supports task level parallelism by adopting actor model and the framework takes CAL code and generates implementations in the native language of several different architectures.In order to address the challenge of custom hardware development, we first evaluate a commercial manycore architecture namely Epiphany and identify its demerits. Then we study manycore architectures in order to reveal possible uses of heterogeneity in manycores and facilitate choice of architecture for software and hardware development. We define a taxonomy for manycore architectures that is based on the levels of heterogeneity they contain and discuss the benefits and drawbacks of these levels. We finally develop and evaluate a design method to design heterogeneous manycore architectures customized based on application requirements. The architectures designed with this method consist of cores with application specific accelerators. The majority of the design method is automated with software tools, which support different design configurations in order to increase the productivity of the hardware developer and enable design space exploration.Our results show that the dataflow language, together with the software development tool, decreases software development efforts significantly (25-50%), while having a small impact (2-17%) on the performance. The evaluation of the design method reveal that the performance of automatically generated accelerators is between 96-100% of the performance of their manually developed counterparts. Additionally, it is possible to increase the performance of the architectures by increasing the number of cores and using application specific accelerators, usually with a cost on the area usage. However, under certain circumstances, using accelerator may lead to avoiding usage of large general purpose components such as the floating-point unit and therefore improves the area utilization. Eventually, the final impact on the performance and area usage depends on the configurations. When compared to the Epiphany architecture, which is a commercial homogeneous manycore, the generated manycores show competitive results. We can conclude that the automated design method simplifies heterogeneous manycore architecture design and facilitates design space exploration with the use of configurable parameters.
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| 10. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-, et al.
(författare)
-
Using Harmonized Parabolic Synthesis to Implement a Single-Precision Floating-Point Square Root Unit
- 2019
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Ingår i: 2019 IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI (ISVLSI). - : IEEE conference proceedings. - 9781728133911 - 9781728133928 ; , s. 621-626
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper proposes a novel method for performing square root operation on floating-point numbers represented in IEEE-754 single-precision (binary32) format. The method is implemented using Harmonized Parabolic Synthesis. It is implemented with and without pipeline stages individually and synthesized for two different Xilinx FPGA boards.The implementations show better resource usage and latency results when compared to other similar works including Xilinx intellectual property (IP) that uses the CORDIC method. Any method calculating the square root will make approximation errors. Unless these errors are distributed evenly around zero, they can accumulate and give a biased result. An attractive feature of the proposed method is the fact that it distributes the errors evenly around zero, in contrast to CORDIC for instance.Due to the small size, low latency, high throughput, and good error properties, the presented floating-point square root unit is suitable for high performance embedded systems. It can be integrated into a processor’s floating point unit or be used as astand-alone accelerator. © 2019 IEEE.
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| 11. |
- Savas, Süleyman, 1986-
(författare)
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Utilizing Heterogeneity in Manycore Architectures for Streaming Applications
- 2017
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Licentiatavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- In the last decade, we have seen a transition from single-core to manycore in computer architectures due to performance requirements and limitations in power consumption and heat dissipation. The first manycores had homogeneous architectures consisting of a few identical cores. However, the applications, which are executed on these architectures, usually consist of several tasks requiring different hardware resources to be executed efficiently. Therefore, we believe that utilizing heterogeneity in manycores will increase the efficiency of the architectures in terms of performance and power consumption. However, development of heterogeneous architectures is more challenging and the transition from homogeneous to heterogeneous architectures will increase the difficulty of efficient software development due to the increased complexity of the architecture. In order to increase the efficiency of hardware and software development, new hardware design methods and software development tools are required. Additionally, there is a lack of knowledge on the performance of applications when executed on manycore architectures.The transition began with a shift from single-core architectures to homogeneous multicore architectures consisting of a few identical cores. It now continues with a shift from homogeneous architectures with identical cores to heterogeneous architectures with different types of cores specialized for different purposes. However, this transition has increased the complexity of architectures and hence the complexity of software development and execution. In order to decrease the complexity of software development, new software tools are required. Additionally, there is a lack of knowledge on what kind of heterogeneous manycore design is most efficient for different applications and what are the performances of these applications when executed on current commercial manycores.This thesis studies manycore architectures in order to reveal possible uses of heterogeneity in manycores and facilitate choice of architecture for software and hardware developers. It defines a taxonomy for manycore architectures that is based on the levels of heterogeneity they contain and discusses benefits and drawbacks of these levels. Additionally, it evaluates several applications, a dataflow language (CAL), a source-to-source compilation framework (Cal2Many), and a commercial manycore architecture (Epiphany). The compilation framework takes implementations written in the dataflow language as input and generates code targetting different manycore platforms. Based on these evaluations, the thesis identifies the bottlenecks of the architecture. It finally presents a methodology for developing heterogeneoeus manycore architectures which target specific application domains.Our studies show that using different types of cores in manycore architectures has the potential to increase the performance of streaming applications. If we add specialized hardware blocks to a core, the performance easily increases by 15x for the target application while the core size increases by 40-50% which can be optimized further. Other results prove that dataflow languages, together with software development tools, decrease software development efforts significantly (25-50%) while having a small impact (2-17%) on the performance.
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| 12. |
- Xypolitidis, Benard, et al.
(författare)
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Towards Architectural Design Space Exploration for Heterogeneous Manycores
- 2016
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Ingår i: Proceedings. - Piscataway, NJ : IEEE Computer Society. - 9781467387750 ; , s. 805-810
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Today many of the high performance embedded processors already contain multiple processor cores and we see heterogeneous manycore architectures being proposed. Therefore it is very desirable to have a fast way to explore various heterogeneous architectures through the use of an architectural design space exploration tool, giving the designer the option to explore design alternatives before the physical implementation. In this paper, we have extended Heracles, a design space exploration tool for (homogeneous) manycore architectures, to incorporate different types of processing cores, and thus allowus to model heterogeneity. Our tool, called the Heterogeneous Heracles System (HHS), can besides the already supported MIPS core also include OpenRISC cores. The new tool retains the possibility available in Heracles to perform register transfer level (RTL) simulations of each explored architecture in Verilog as well as synthesizing it to field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). To facilitate the exploration of heterogeneous architectures, we have also extended the graphical user interface (GUI) to support heterogeneity. This GUI provides options to configure the types of core, core settings, memory system and network topology. Some initial results on FPGA utilization are presented from synthesizing both homogeneous and heterogeneous manycore architectures, as well as some benchmark results from both simulated and synthesized architectures.
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| 13. |
- Yang, Mingkun, 1990-, et al.
(författare)
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A Communication Library for Mapping Dataflow Applications on Manycore Architectures
- 2013
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Ingår i: Proceedings of the 6th Swedish Multicore Computing Workshop. ; , s. 65-68
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Dataflow programming is a promising paradigm for high performance embedded parallel computing. When mapping a dataflow program onto a manycore architecture a key component is the library to express the communication between the actors. In this paper we present a dataflow communication library supporting the CAL actor language. A first implementation of the communication library is created for Adapteva’s manycore architecture Epiphany that contains an onchip 2-D mesh network. Three different buffering methods, with and without direct memory access (DMA) transfer, have been implemented and evaluated. We have also made a preliminary study on the effect of mapping strategies of the actors onto the cores. The assessment of the library is based on a CAL implementation of a two dimensional inverse discrete cosine transform (2D-IDCT) and our own CAL-to-C compilation framework. As expected the results show that the most efficient actor to-core mapping strategy is to keep the communication to the nearest neighbor communication pattern as much as possible. Thus, the best way to place a pipelined sequence of computations like our 2D-IDCT is to place the actors into cores in a serpentine fashion. For this application we found that the simple receiver side buffer outperforms the more complicated buffering strategies that used DMA transfer.
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