Team 142875

Team members

• Michael Patterson
• Chetan N-Govindaiah
• Jungmin Park

Assignment 1

Developing a Custom Personality

1 Analyze Application

• How does the current application perform on existing hardware?
• What bottleneacks are limiting the performance?
• What data structures are involved?
• How parallelizable is the application?

2 Evaluate Hardware Options

3 Define Custom Instructions

• The functions implemented by the hardware design can then be mapped to custom instructions.

4 Develop Software Model of Custom Personality

• Convey provides an architecture simulation environment to allow rapid prototyping of both the hardware and software components of a custom personality.
• This environment is written in C++ to emulate the rest of the system. It includes hardware models of instruction dispatch, register state and the memory subsystem.

5 Modify Application to Use Coprocessor

6 Compile Application with Convey Compiler

7 Simulate Application with Convey Architecture Simulator

• This step allows the application and the custom instruction set to be debugged before the hardware is designed.

8 Develop FPGA Hardware

9 Simulate Hardware in Convey Simulation Environment

• Convey provides a hardware simulation environment with bus-functional models for all hardware interfaces to the Application Engine (AE) FPGA.
• Using a standard VPI interface (Verilog Procedural Inteface) the architecture simulator can be used to provide stimulus to the HDL simulation.

10 Integrate with Convey Hardware

Running the Sample Application []

1. Copy Sample AE and Sample Application The Vadd sample personality and application is installed with the PDK RPM in /opt/convey/pdk/2010_08_09/.

The sample is made up of two components:

• cae_pers_vadd - contains the sample custom personality, including the software model which emulates the Application Engine FPGA
  • CaeSimPers - contains the AE simulation model of the sample personality
    • CaelsaVadd.cpp - models the behavior of the custom personality, implements the following functions :
      • void CCaelsa::InitPers()
      • void CCaelas::CaepInst(int masked, int ae, int opcode, int immed, unit64 scalar
  • phys - Xilinx physical implementation, contains constraints files
  • testbench
  • verilog-RTL to be synthesized into FPGA
• SampleAppVadd - contains the application that uses the instruction defined in the CasSample tree.

cd $HOME
mkdir pdk_sample
cp -r /opt/convey/pdk/2010_08_09/cae_sample_vadd pdk_sample
cp -r /opt/convey/pdk/2010_08_09/pdk_apps/SampleAppVadd pdk_sample

2. Build the Sample AE and Sample Application

cd $HOME/pdk_sample/cae_pers_vadd/CaeSim 
make
cd ../../SampleAppVadd
make

3. Custom AE Software Simulation

• Set up Environment Variables