A technical paper titled “Towards Generalized On-Chip Communication for Programmable Accelerators in Heterogeneous Architectures” was published by researchers at Columbia University and IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center.
“We present several enhancements to the open-source ESP platform to support flexible and efficient on-chip communication for programmable accelerators in heterogeneous SoCs. These enhancements include 1) a flexible point-to-point communication mechanism between accelerators, 2) a multicast NoC that supports data forwarding to multiple accelerators simultaneously, 3) accelerator synchronization leveraging the SoC’s coherence protocol, 4) an accelerator interface that offers fine-grained control over the communication mode used, and 5) an example ISA extension to support our enhancements. Our solution adds negligible area to the SoC architecture and requires minimal changes to the accelerators themselves. We have validated most of these features in complex FPGA prototypes and plan to include them in the open-source release of ESP in the coming months.”
Find the technical paper here. Published July 2024.
Joseph Zuckerman, John-David Wellman, Ajay Vanamali, Manish Shankar, Gabriele Tombesi, Karthik Swaminathan, Kevin Lee, Mohit Kapur, Robert Philhower, Pradip Bose, and Luca P. Carloni. “Towards Generalized On-Chip Communication for Programmable Accelerators in Heterogeneous Architectures.” arXiv:2407.04182v1
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