User-space emulation framework for domain-specific SoC design

Joshua Mack, Nirmal Kumbhare, N. K. Anish, Umit Y. Ogras, Ali Akoglu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

13 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this work, we propose a portable, Linux-based emulation framework to provide an ecosystem for hardware-software co-design of Domain-specific SoCs (DSSoCs) and enable their rapid evaluation during the pre-silicon design phase. This framework holistically targets three key challenges of DSSoC design: accelerator integration, resource management, and application development. We address these challenges via a flexible and lightweight user-space runtime environment that enables easy integration of new accelerators, scheduling heuristics, and user applications, and we illustrate the utility of each through various case studies. With signal processing (WiFi and RADAR) as the target domain, we use our framework to evaluate the performance of various dynamic workloads on hypothetical DSSoC hardware configurations composed of mixtures of CPU cores and FFT accelerators using a Zynq UltraScale +TM MPSoC. We show the portability of this framework by conducting a similar study on an Odroid platform composed of big.LITTLE ARM clusters. Finally, we introduce a prototype compilation toolchain that enables automatic mapping of unlabeled C code to DSSoC platforms. Taken together, this environment offers a unique ecosystem to rapidly perform functional verification and obtain performance and utilization estimates that help accelerate convergence towards a final DSSoC design.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings - 2020 IEEE 34th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2020
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages44-53
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781728174457
DOIs
StatePublished - May 2020
Event34th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2020 - New Orleans, United States
Duration: May 18 2020May 22 2020

Publication series

NameProceedings - 2020 IEEE 34th International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2020

Conference

Conference34th IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops, IPDPSW 2020
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityNew Orleans
Period5/18/205/22/20

Keywords

  • Automatic application mapping
  • DSSoC
  • Domain-Specific
  • Domain-Specific SoC
  • Emulation
  • SoC
  • System on Chip

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Computer Networks and Communications
  • Hardware and Architecture
  • Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
  • Control and Optimization

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