A prototype of The Single-ISA Heterogeneous MAny-core Computer (SHMAC) written in the Chisel Hardware Construction Language. Chisel is a Scala-embedded HDL and requires the Simple Build Tool to work.
The project was part of the ongoing SHMAC research project at NTNU. It's main purpose was to investigate the possibility for a SHMAC based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture.
The project consists of several modules that together make up a prototype of the SHMAC. The architecture of the project is described below. Those interested can also look at the final project report.
A high-level overview of the SHMAC architecture is shown below.
A router is one of the most fundamental parts of a heterogeneous computer, this is an implementation of a router that implements an XY-routing routing algorithm for the packages in the network.
Each tile in the network are connected together with the routers, the figure below shows a detailed architecture of the router.
The memory is a simple module that supports read and writes, and simply wraps around a Chisel Mem object.
This project utilizes a 3-Stage Sodor processor core from the Sodor Processor Collection. The processor core had to be modified slightly in order to support arbitrary memory stalls, which is an important requirement for heterogeneous systems.
Two different tiles are implemented, a Memory Tile and a Sodor Tile. The two tiles wraps around the Memory module and the Sodor module, respectively, and connects these two modules together with a Router. These tiles acts as the basic building blocks, that can be combined in order to make a prototype of the SHMAC.
The architecture of the two tiles are shown below.
At last, two small prototypes of the SHMAC are included in the project.
The first prototypes demonstrates a simple system with one processor core and one memory element.
The second prototype demonstrates a system with two processor that executes the same programs, but behaves differently based on their location in the interconnect-network.
All the components and modules have been tested and simulated. The tests are initiated in a simple
test-runner found in TestMain.scala. The projects Makefile can be used to run unit-level tests,
module-level tests, or all tests.
Run all tests:
$ make
Test a module, e.g.
$ make router
Run a single unit test, e.g.
$ make CrossBar.out