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. © 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.

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.

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 Crown

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

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.

Convolution neural networks (CNN) are extensively used for deep learning applications such as image recognition and computer vision. The convolution module of these networks is highly compute-intensive. Having an efficient implementation of the convolution module enables realizing the inference part of the neural network on embedded platforms. Low precision parameters require less memory, less computation time, and less power consumption while achieving high classification accuracy. Furthermore, streaming the data over parallelized processing units saves a considerable amount of memory, which is a key concern in memory constrained embedded platforms. In this paper, we explore the design space for streamed CNN on Epiphany manycore architecture using varying precisions for weights (ranging from binary to 32-bit). Both AlexNet and GoogleNet are explored for two different memory sizes of Epiphany cores. We are able to achieve competitive performance for both Alexnet and GoogleNet with respect to emerging manycores. Furthermore, the effects of different design choices in terms of precision, memory size, and the number of cores are evaluated by applying the proposed method.

The successful realization of next generation radar systems have high performance demands on the signal processing chain. Among these are advanced Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) radars in which complex calculations are to be performed on huge sets of data in real-time. Manycore architectures are designed to provide flexibility and high performance essential for such streaming applications. This paper deals with the implementation of compute-intensive parts of AESA radar signal processing chain in a high-level dataflow language; CAL. We evaluate the approach by targeting a commercial manycore architecture, Epiphany, and present our findings in terms of performance and productivity gains achieved in this case study. The comparison of the performance results with the reference sequential implementations executing on a state-of-the-art embedded processor show that we are able to achieve a speedup of 1.6x to 4.4x by using only 10 cores of Epiphany. © Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015

Manycore architectures are dominating the development of advanced embedded computing due to the computational and power demand of high performance applications. This has introduced an additional complexity with regard to the efficient exploitation of the underlying hardware and the development of efficient parallel implementations. To tackle this we model applications using a dataflow programming language, perform high-level transformations of dataflow actors, and generate native code by using our compilation framework.This paper presents the actor fission transformations of our Cal2Many compilation framework. The transformations have facilitated the mapping of big dataflow actors on memory restricted embedded manycores, increased the utilization of the hardware, and enabled support for task and data-level parallelism. We have applied the actor transformations to two blocks of MPEG-4 decoder and executed it on the Epiphany manycore architecture. The result shows the practicality and feasibility of our approach.

The arrival of manycore platforms has imposed programming challenges for mainstream embedded system developers. In this paper, we discuss the significance of actor-oriented dataflow languages and present our compilation framework for CAL Actor Language that leads to increased portability and retargetability. We demonstrate the applicability of our approach with streaming applications targeting the Epiphany many-core architecture. We have performed an in-depth analysis of MPEG-4 SP implemented on Epiphany using our framework and studied the effects of actor composition. We have identified hardware aspects such as increased off-chip memory bandwidth and larger local memories that could result in further performance improvements.

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.