ARAPrototyper: Enabling Rapid Prototyping and Evaluation for Accelerator-Rich Architectures

TL;DR

ARAPrototyper is a versatile FPGA-based platform that accelerates the design, prototyping, and evaluation of accelerator-rich architectures, significantly reducing development time compared to traditional simulation methods.

Contribution

It introduces a reusable, customizable FPGA prototype with automated design flow and software support, enabling rapid exploration of ARA design spaces.

Findings

Achieves 4,000X to 10,000X faster evaluation than full-system simulation.

Supports high-level synthesis accelerators with automated integration.

Facilitates comprehensive design space exploration for ARAs.

Abstract

Compared to conventional general-purpose processors, accelerator-rich architectures (ARAs) can provide orders-of-magnitude performance and energy gains and are emerging as one of the most promising solutions in the age of dark silicon. However, many design issues related to the complex interaction between general-purpose cores, accelerators, customized on-chip interconnects, and memory systems remain unclear and difficult to evaluate. In this paper we design and implement the ARAPrototyper to enable rapid design space explorations for ARAs in real silicons and reduce the tedious prototyping efforts far down to manageable efforts. First, ARAPrototyper provides a reusable baseline prototype with a highly customizable memory system, including interconnect between accelerators and buffers, interconnect between buffers and last-level cache (LLC) or DRAM, coherency choice at LLC or DRAM, and address translation support. Second, ARAPrototyper provides a clean interface to quickly integrate users' own accelerators written in high-level synthesis (HLS) code. The whole design flow is highly automated to generate a prototype of ARA on an FPGA system-on-chip (SoC). Third, to quickly develop applications that run seamlessly on the ARA prototype, ARAPrototyper provides a system software stack, abstracts the accelerators as software libraries, and provides APIs for software developers. Our experimental results demonstrate that ARAPrototyper enables a wide range of design space explorations for ARAs at manageable prototyping efforts, which has 4,000X to 10,000X faster evaluation time than full-system simulations. We believe that ARAPrototyper can be an attractive alternative for ARA design and evaluation.