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RAMP gold: an FPGA-based architecture simulator for multiprocessors

Published: 13 June 2010 Publication History

Abstract

We present RAMP Gold, an economical FPGA-based architecture simulator that allows rapid early design-space exploration of manycore systems. The RAMP Gold prototype is a high-throughput, cycle-accurate full-system simulator that runs on a single Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA board, and which simulates a 64-core shared-memory target machine capable of booting real operating systems. To improve FPGA implementation efficiency, functionality and timing are modeled separately and host multithreading is used in both models. We evaluate the prototype's performance using a modern parallel benchmark suite running on our manycore research operating system, achieving two orders of magnitude speedup compared to a widely-used software-based architecture simulator.

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cover image ACM Conferences
DAC '10: Proceedings of the 47th Design Automation Conference
June 2010
1036 pages
ISBN:9781450300025
DOI:10.1145/1837274
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 13 June 2010

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Author Tags

  1. FPGA
  2. multiprocessors
  3. simulation

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  • (2024)Performance interfaces for hardware acceleratorsProceedings of the 18th USENIX Conference on Operating Systems Design and Implementation10.5555/3691938.3691984(855-874)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2024
  • (2024)MuchiSim: A Simulation Framework for Design Exploration of Multi-Chip Manycore Systems2024 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS61541.2024.00015(48-60)Online publication date: 5-May-2024
  • (2023)Fast Behavioural RTL Simulation of 10B Transistor SoC Designs with Metro-Mpi2023 Design, Automation & Test in Europe Conference & Exhibition (DATE)10.23919/DATE56975.2023.10137080(1-6)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2023)Accelerating RTL Simulation with Hardware-Software Co-DesignProceedings of the 56th Annual IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture10.1145/3613424.3614257(153-166)Online publication date: 28-Oct-2023
  • (2023)SMAPPIC: Scalable Multi-FPGA Architecture Prototype Platform in the CloudProceedings of the 28th ACM International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems, Volume 210.1145/3575693.3575753(733-746)Online publication date: 27-Jan-2023
  • (2023)On the Measurement of Performance Metrics for Virtualization-Enhanced ArchitecturesProceedings of the 38th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing10.1145/3555776.3577705(49-56)Online publication date: 27-Mar-2023
  • (2023)ENCORE: Efficient Architecture Verification Framework with FPGA AccelerationProceedings of the 2023 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field Programmable Gate Arrays10.1145/3543622.3573187(209-219)Online publication date: 12-Feb-2023
  • (2023)Simulating Wrong-Path Instructions in Decoupled Functional-First Simulation2023 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS)10.1109/ISPASS57527.2023.00021(124-133)Online publication date: Apr-2023
  • (2023)FreezeTime: Towards System Emulation through Architectural Virtualization2023 IEEE International Parallel and Distributed Processing Symposium Workshops (IPDPSW)10.1109/IPDPSW59300.2023.00033(129-136)Online publication date: May-2023
  • (2023)Benefits of Optimistic Parallel Discrete Event Simulation for Network-on-Chip Simulation2023 IEEE/ACM 27th International Symposium on Distributed Simulation and Real Time Applications (DS-RT)10.1109/DS-RT58998.2023.00013(30-39)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
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