Harmonica: An FPGA-Based Data Parallel Soft Core

Abstract

General-purpose GPUs or GPGPUs have taken their place in the market, being present in 38 of the Top 500 supercomputers [5]. In the same way that the emergence of FPGAs in the 1980s led to a demand for soft cores with instruction sets similar to the CPUs of the day, we anticipate a similar demand in the 2010s for soft cores with GPGPU instruction sets. These architectures are distinguished by their SIMT, single-instruction-multiple-thread, execution model, acheiving throughput by running multiple threads of execution simultaneously across multiple functional units, keeping separate register values for each lane of execution.