Verilog-based simulation of hardware support for data-flow concurrency on multicore systems

Abstract

Data-Driven Multithreading (DDM) is a threaded data-flow model that schedules threads for execution based on data availability. DDM is utilizing a Thread Scheduling Unit (TSU) for the management of the threads on sequential processors. In this work we present the hardware implementation of the TSU with synthesizable code using the Verilog HDL and its evaluation using the ISim simulator. The evaluation results show that the TSU is able to run at a maximum frequency of 180 MHz and consumes only 5% of the Xilinx Virtex-6 FPGA resources. The initial results obtained in this work will enable us to design an FPGA based DDM multicore chip consisting of several Microblaze cores driven by the TSU. Thus, we will be able to evaluate the performance of the novel threaded data-flow model and have direct comparison with the sequential model on the same hardware.