Cymric: A Framework for Prototyping Near-Memory Architectures

Over the past two years, a prototyping infrastructure has grown up around CHDL; a C++ library for designing and simulating hardware, and HARP; a family of instruction set architectures for data parallel computing. Among the fruits of this effort are several processor cores, including a singleinstruction-multiple-thread implementation of HARP called Harmonica and a variety of FPGA and simulation oriented memory system components. Collectively, these pieces form Cymric, an infrastructure for prototyping near-memory processor architectures. Here, we report on the current status of our efforts, enumerating the software and hardware components produced and discussing the tools we have found indispensable in their production.