The B3RISC: A Flexible FPGA-optimized
Microprocessor for Multicore OS Research
Tuesday September 30, 2008
Hamerschlag Hall D-210
4:30 pm
Eric Chung
Carnegie Mellon University
The B3RISC is a flexible and domain-specific FPGA-based microprocessor that
was recently developed at Microsoft Research for rapid multicore exploration
of experimental parallel programming models and operating systems. In
contrast to existing general-purpose soft cores, the B3RISC incorporates
several unique design choices that are tailored to its given research
applications. In particular, one of the primary objectives is to facilitate
prototyping and co-development of both hardware and software within the
Singularity project at Microsoft, which proposes a highly dependable
operating system where the kernel, drivers, and applications are all written
in managed code. Another objective of B3RISC is to support easily modifiable
hardware source code and end-user instruction set customization.
In this talk, I will present the software applications and a detailed design
overview of B3RISC. I will then discuss a completed implementation that was
mapped and measured on the BEE3 FPGA platform. The final implementation is a
RISC in-order processor pipeline and incorporates several key
characteristics: 1) written exclusively in a flexible and type-safe,
high-level operation-centric hardware description language, 2) omits
conventional hardware protection mechanisms (e.g., MMU, TLBs) by leveraging
the language safety properties of managed code, 3) supports late-binding of
user-customizable ISA instructions via low-overhead micro-ops, and 4)
efficiently utilizes FPGA resources to support a high core count per chip.
Eric just completed his fourth year as a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon
University and is advised by Professor James C. Hoe. He is interested in
FPGA-accelerated full-system multiprocessor simulation technologies and
developing useful instrumentation components to accompany them. The B3RISC
was developed at Microsoft Research with Chuck P. Thacker and John Davis in
the summer of 2008.
|