User-Space Emulation Framework for Domain-Specific SoC Design

Abstract

In this work, we propose a portable, Linux-based emulation framework to provide an ecosystem for hardwaresoftware co-design of Domain-specific SoCs (DSSoCs) and enable their rapid evaluation during the pre-silicon design phase. This framework holistically targets three key challenges of DSSoC design: accelerator integration, resource management, and application development. We address these challenges via a flexible and lightweight user-space runtime environment that enables easy integration of new accelerators, scheduling heuristics, and user applications, and we illustrate the utility of each through various case studies. With signal processing (WiFi and RADAR) as the target domain, we use our framework to evaluate the performance of various dynamic workloads on hypothetical DSSoC hardware configurations composed of mixtures of CPU cores and FFT accelerators using a Zynq UltraScale+ TM MPSoC. We show the portability of this framework by conducting a similar study on an Odroid platform composed of big.LITTLE ARM clusters. Finally, we introduce a prototype compilation toolchain that enables automatic mapping of unlabeled C code to DSSoC platforms. Taken together, this environment offers a unique ecosystem to rapidly perform functional verification and obtain performance and utilization estimates that help accelerate convergence towards a final DSSoC design.

Runtime Task Scheduling Using Imitation Learning for Heterogeneous Many-Core Systems

“…In addition, the DSSoC integrates accelerator clusters for matrix multiplication, FFT, and Viterbi decoder to address the computing requirements of the target domain applications summarized in Table III. The accelerator interfaces are adapted from [17]. The number of accelerator instances in each cluster is selected based on how much the target applications use them.…”