RPM: A Rapid Prototyping Engine for Multiprocessor Systems

In multiprocessor systems, processing nodes contain a processor, some cache and a share of the system memory, and are connected through a scalable interconnect. The system memory partitions may be shared (shared-memory systems) or disjoint (messagepassing systems). Within each class of systems many architectural variations are possible. Fair comparisons among systems are difficult because of the lack of a common hardware platform to implement the different architectures. RPM (Rapid Prototyping engine for Multiprocessors) is a hardware emulator for the rapid prototyping of various multiprocessor architectures. In RPM, the hardware of the target machine is emulated by reprogrammable controllers implemented with Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). The processors, memories and interconnect are off-theshelf and their relative speeds can be modified to emulate various component technologies. Every emulation is an actual incarnation of the target machine and therefore software written for the target machine can be easily ported on it with little modification and without instrumentation of the code. In this paper, we describe the architecture of RPM, its performance and the prototyping methodology. We also compare our approach with simulation and breadboard prototyping.