HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs
Designing hardware cores for FPGAs can quickly become a complicated task, difficult even for experienced engineers. With the addition of more sophisticated development tools and maturing high-level language-to-gates techniques, designs can be rapidly assembled; however, when the design is evaluated...
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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Wiley
2012-01-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing |
| Online Access: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/162404 |
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| _version_ | 1849409793514536960 |
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| author | Andrew G. Schmidt Neil Steiner Matthew French Ron Sass |
| author_facet | Andrew G. Schmidt Neil Steiner Matthew French Ron Sass |
| author_sort | Andrew G. Schmidt |
| collection | DOAJ |
| description | Designing hardware cores for FPGAs can quickly become a complicated task, difficult even for experienced engineers. With the addition of more sophisticated development tools and maturing high-level language-to-gates techniques, designs can be rapidly assembled; however, when the design is evaluated on the FPGA, the performance may not be what was expected. Therefore, an engineer may need to augment the design to include performance monitors to better understand the bottlenecks in the system or to aid in the debugging of the design. Unfortunately, identifying what to monitor and adding the infrastructure to retrieve the monitored data can be a challenging and time-consuming task. Our work alleviates this effort. We present the Hardware Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (HwPMI), which includes a collection of software tools and hardware cores that can be used to profile the current design, recommend and insert performance monitors directly into the HDL or netlist, and retrieve the monitored data with minimal invasiveness to the design. Three applications are used to demonstrate and evaluate HwPMI’s capabilities. The results are highly encouraging as the infrastructure adds numerous capabilities while requiring minimal effort by the designer and low resource overhead to the existing design. |
| format | Article |
| id | doaj-art-79691ca71cc04e3a8a75a0258294288c |
| institution | Kabale University |
| issn | 1687-7195 1687-7209 |
| language | English |
| publishDate | 2012-01-01 |
| publisher | Wiley |
| record_format | Article |
| series | International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing |
| spelling | doaj-art-79691ca71cc04e3a8a75a0258294288c2025-08-20T03:35:23ZengWileyInternational Journal of Reconfigurable Computing1687-71951687-72092012-01-01201210.1155/2012/162404162404HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAsAndrew G. Schmidt0Neil Steiner1Matthew French2Ron Sass3Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, 3811 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22203, USAInformation Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, 3811 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22203, USAInformation Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, 3811 North Fairfax Drive, Suite 200, Arlington, VA 22203, USAReconfigurable Computing Systems Lab, ECE Department, UNC Charlotte, 9201 University City Boulevard, Charlotte, NC 28223, USADesigning hardware cores for FPGAs can quickly become a complicated task, difficult even for experienced engineers. With the addition of more sophisticated development tools and maturing high-level language-to-gates techniques, designs can be rapidly assembled; however, when the design is evaluated on the FPGA, the performance may not be what was expected. Therefore, an engineer may need to augment the design to include performance monitors to better understand the bottlenecks in the system or to aid in the debugging of the design. Unfortunately, identifying what to monitor and adding the infrastructure to retrieve the monitored data can be a challenging and time-consuming task. Our work alleviates this effort. We present the Hardware Performance Monitoring Infrastructure (HwPMI), which includes a collection of software tools and hardware cores that can be used to profile the current design, recommend and insert performance monitors directly into the HDL or netlist, and retrieve the monitored data with minimal invasiveness to the design. Three applications are used to demonstrate and evaluate HwPMI’s capabilities. The results are highly encouraging as the infrastructure adds numerous capabilities while requiring minimal effort by the designer and low resource overhead to the existing design.http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/162404 |
| spellingShingle | Andrew G. Schmidt Neil Steiner Matthew French Ron Sass HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing |
| title | HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs |
| title_full | HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs |
| title_fullStr | HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs |
| title_full_unstemmed | HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs |
| title_short | HwPMI: An Extensible Performance Monitoring Infrastructure for Improving Hardware Design and Productivity on FPGAs |
| title_sort | hwpmi an extensible performance monitoring infrastructure for improving hardware design and productivity on fpgas |
| url | http://dx.doi.org/10.1155/2012/162404 |
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