Design Space Exploration of Multiprocessor Systems with MultiContext Reconfigurable Co-Processors

Future high performance computing systems may consist of multiple processors and reconfigurable logic coprocessors. As indicated by industry trends, such co-processors will be integrated on existing motherboards without any glue logic. It is likely that such hybrid computing machines will be a breakthrough for various high performance applications. As a result, it has become essential to investigate the system architectures of such machines. This paper describes a fullsystem simulation approach to model and evaluate hybrid computing systems made up of multiple processors and coarsegrained reconfigurable logic co-processors. We develop a fullsystem simulator for such hybrid machines by extending an existing full-system simulator to have device models for multicontext coarse-grained reconfigurable logic co-processors. The proposed full-system simulator is able to execute an unmodified multiprocessor operating system and a multiband filtering application. Using this full-system simulation approach, we have investigated the tradeoffs among various system architectures.