Hardware acceleration in the form of customized datapath and control circuitry tuned to specific applications has gained popularity for its promise to utilize transistors more efficiently. Historically, the computer architecture community has focused on general-purpose processors and extensive research infrastructure has been developed to support research efforts in this domain, such as power-performance modeling and workload characterization. Envisioning future heterogeneous, accelerator-centric computing systems with a diverse set of general-purpose cores and accelerators, researchers must add a set of new accelerator-centric research infrastructures to their toolboxes.
This tutorial will discuss state-of-the-art research infrastructures available for accelerator research ranging from applications to power-performance simulation to hardware prototyping. We will also organize a panel with invited researchers from both industry and academia to discuss what we need to do to build a healthy ecosystem to enable accelerator-rich architecture (ARA) research.
Introduction
Aladdin
Rapid Hardware Specialization with HLS: Glass Half Full
Parade
gem5-Aladdin
ARAPrototyper
Virtual Machine Setup
Aladdin Hands-on
Prof. David Brooks,
Harvard University (dbrooks@eecs.harvard.edu)
Prof. Jason Cong,
UCLA (cong@cs.ucla.edu)
Zhenman Fang, UCLA (zhenman@cs.ucla.edu)
Yakun Sophia Shao,
NVIDIA Research (sshao@nvidia.com)
Sam Xi,
Harvard University (samxi@eecs.harvard.edu)
Aladdin: A pre-RTL, power-performance-area simulator for accelerators.
gem5-Aladdin: an Integrated Architecture-level SoC Simulator.
LLVM-Tracer: An LLVM optimization pass to print a dynamic LLVM IR trace.
MachSuite: A benchmark suite for accelerators.
Microbenchmarks to characterize modern CPU-FPGA platforms.
Medical Imaging Pipeline: Developing an accelerated medical image processing pipeline.
PARADE: Full-System Accelerator-Rich Architecture Simulator.
WIICA: An ISA-independent workload characterization tool for accelerators.
International Symposium on High Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA), Feb 2017.
International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO), Oct 2016. [PDF] [slides] [bibtex]
Design Automation Conference (DAC), June 2016.
Morgan & Claypool, July 2015.
International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), March 2015.
International Conference on Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD) 2015.
HPCA Sensors and Cloud Architectures Workshop (SCAW), Feb 2015. [PDF] [slides] [bibtex]
International Symposium on Workload Characterization (IISWC), October 2014. [PDF] [bibtex]
International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA), June 2014. [PDF] [slides] [bibtex]
International Symposium on Low Power Electronics and Design (ISLPED), Sept 2013. [PDF] [bibtex]
International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), April 2013. [PDF] [slides] [bibtex]
International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD), Oct 2013.