Architectural Design Space Exploration of Heterogeneous Manycores

Abstract: Exploring the benefits of heterogeneous architectures is becoming more desirable dueto migration from single core to manycore architectural systems. A fast way to explorethe heterogeneity is through an architectural design space exploration (ADSE) tool,which gives the designer the option to explore design alternatives before the actualimplementation. Heracles Designer is an ADSE tool which allows the user to modifylarge aspects of the architecture. At present, Heracles Designer is equipped with asingle type of processing core, a MIPS CPU.We have extended the Heracles System in order to enable the system to model het-erogeneity. Our system is called the Heterogeneous Heracles System (HHS), where adifferent type of processing core, the OpenRISC CPU, is interfaced into the HeraclesSystem. Test programs are executed on both the MIPS and OpenRISC CPUs, whichhave provided promising results. In order to provide the designer with the option tomodify the system architecture without changing the source code, a GUI named AD-SET was created. ADSET provides the designer with the ability to modify the coresettings, memory system configuration and network topology configuration.In the HHS the MIPS core can only execute basic instructions, while the OpenRISCcan execute more advanced instructions, giving a designer the option to explore theeffects of heterogeneity based on the big little architectural concept. The results of ourwork provides an infrastructure on how to integrate different types of processing coresinto the HHS.