Heracles: A Tool for Fast RTL-Based Design Space Exploration of Multicore Processors
This paper presents Heracles, an open-source, functional, parameterized, synthesizable multicore system toolkit. Such a multi/many-core design platform is a powerful and versatile research and teaching tool for architectural exploration and hardware-software co-design. The Heracles toolkit comprises...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | Article |
| Language: | en_US |
| Published: |
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
2014
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| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86169 https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8253-7714 https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4301-1159 |
| Summary: | This paper presents Heracles, an open-source, functional, parameterized, synthesizable multicore system toolkit. Such a multi/many-core design platform is a powerful and versatile research and teaching tool for architectural exploration and hardware-software co-design. The Heracles toolkit comprises the soft hardware (HDL) modules, application compiler, and graphical user interface. It is designed with a high degree of modularity to support fast exploration of future multicore processors of di erent topologies, routing schemes, processing elements (cores), and memory system organizations. It is a component-based framework with parameterized interfaces and strong emphasis on module reusability. The compiler toolchain is used to map C or C++ based applications onto the processing units. The GUI allows the user to quickly con gure and launch a system instance for easy factorial development and evaluation. Hardware modules are implemented in synthesizable Verilog and are FPGA platform independent. The Heracles tool is freely available under the open-source MIT license at: http://projects.csail.mit.edu/heracles |
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