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
- 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 ./UserApp.exe