A Template-based Framework for Exploring Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures

Abstract

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architectures (CGRAs) are being considered as a complementary addition to modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems. These reconfigurable devices overcome many of the limitations of the (more popular) FPGA, by providing higher operating frequency, denser compute capacity, and lower power consumption. Today, CGRAs have been used in several embedded applications, including automobile, telecommunication, and mobile systems, but the literature on CGRAs in HPC is sparse and the field full of research opportunities. In this work, we introduce our CGRA simulator infrastructure for use in evaluating future HPC CGRA systems. Our CGRA simulator is built on synthesizable VHDL and is highly parametrizable, including support for connectivity, SIMD, data-type width, and heterogeneity. Unlike other related work, our framework supports co-integration with third-party memory simulators or evaluation of future memory architecture, which is crucial to reason around memory-bound applications. We demonstrate how our framework can be used to explore the performance of multiple different kernels, showing the impact of different configuration and design-space options.