Fast evaluation methodology for automatic custom hardware prototyping

Abstract

Hardware customization for scientific applications has shown a big potential for reducing power consumption and increasing performance. In particular, the automatic generation of ISA extensions for General-Purpose Processors (GPPs) to accelerate domain-specific applications is an active field of research to accelerate. Those domain-specific accelerated processors are mostly evaluated in simulation environments due to technical and programmability issues while using real hardware. There is no automatic mechanism to test those custom units in a real hardware environment. In this paper we present a toolchain that can automatically identify candidate parts of the code suitable for reconfigurable hardware acceleration. We validate our toolchain using ClustalW.