CPA-CSA: Accelerating Architectural-level, Full-system Multiprocessor Simulations using FPGAs

通用并行计算的可编程性挑战迫切需要计算机硬件和软件研究人员共同努力解决。然而，目前全系统模拟器的速度慢得令人无法接受，这限制了多处理器/多核的研究。拟议的ProtoFlex项目开发了一种fpga加速仿真技术，以提供必要的仿真性能，从而在模拟实验架构之上进行全面的软件研究。ProtoFlex模拟器不是FPGA原型。ProtoFlex仿真架构依靠硬件虚拟化来实现全系统保真度和系统可扩展性，同时降低了传统FPGA原型设计的复杂性。该项目将开发一种具有移植和多处理器上下文交错的混合模拟，其目标是将硬件结构所需的复杂性与非常大的目标多处理器系统的复杂性解耦。该项目还将研究实时、深度仪器和模拟事件分析的硬件技术。

The programmability challenges to general-purpose parallel computing desperately need computer hardware and software researchers to work together on the solutions. However, the unacceptably slow speed of current full-system simulators limits the multiprocessor/multi-core research.The proposed ProtoFlex project develops an FPGA-accelerated simulation technology to deliver the necessary simulation performance to enable full-scale software research on top of simulated experimental architectures. ProtoFlex simulators are not FPGA prototypes. The ProtoFlex simulation architecture relies on hardware virtualization to achieve full-system fidelity and system scalability, while mitigating the complexities associated with conventional FPGA prototyping. This project will develop a hybrid simulation with transplanting and with interleaving of multiple processor contexts, with the goal to decouple the required complexity of the hardware construction from the complexity of a very large target multiprocessor system. This project will also investigate in-hardware techniques for real-time, deep instrumentation and analysis of simulation events.