Date of Graduation

5-2023

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering

Department

Computer Science and Computer Engineering

Advisor/Mentor

Andrews, David

Committee Member/Reader

Nelson, Alexander

Committee Member/Second Reader

Huang, Miaoqing

Abstract

The SPAR-2 array processor was designed as an overlay architecture for implementation on Xilinx Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). As an overlay, the SPAR-2 array processor can be configured to take advantage of the specific resources available on different FPGAs. However once configured, the SPAR-2 requires programmer’s to have knowledge of the low level architecture, and write platform-specific code. In this thesis SVAR, a hardware/software co-designed virtual machine, is proposed that runs on the SPAR-2. SVAR allows programmers to write portable, platform-independent code once and have it interpreted for any specific configuration. Results are presented that verify the virtual machine enables the same code to run without modification on different configurations of the SPAR-2 array running on different FPGA platforms. The results show that the performance cost of this portability is modest, incurring an average 5.6% decrease in performance in partial MLP simulations compared to hand-tuned custom code.

Keywords

Virtual Machine, Array Processor, Portable code, SPAR, FPGA, Reconfigurable

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