1. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S1 A Linux-based Software Environment for the Reconfigurable Scalable Computing Project John A. Williams 1 (jwilliams@itee.uq.edu.au) Neil W. Bergmann 1 (n.bergmann@itee.uq.edu.au) Robert F. Hodson 2 (robert.f.hodson@nasa.gov) 1 The University Of Queensland, Australia 2 NASA Langley Research Center

2. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S2 RSC Platform Architectural Overview Collection of one or more modular stacks of computing elements RPM is core reconfigurable component hosting reconfigurable FPGA fabric

3. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S3 RSC Embedded Processing Primary target microprocessor is the MicroBlaze TM soft processor. –Design mitigated with XTMR tool (or manually) Embedded Linux –No MMU -> uClinux –Provides easy path to high level development for instrument applications (C, sockets, file systems, etc) –Development environment similar (if not identical) to typical Linux desktop

4. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S4 RSC Software Environment Why Linux? –Path for existing applications onto RSC –Standard platform improves design efficiency Application development/debug Multiprocessing/clustering Software infrastructure –Interoperability Networking File systems –Desktop application prototyping “Linux is the C runtime” – D. Jeff Dionne

5. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S5 Software Multiprocessing Model Message Passing Interface (MPI, MPI2) –Standardised protocol for message passing parallel computation –Strong uptake in terrestrial cluster computing community –Supports distributed (networked) clusters as well as shared memory machines MPI on MicroBlaze and uClinux –Based on Argonne National Labs’ MPICH2 implementation –Start with MPICH on Linux TCP/IP stack –Migrate to higher performance implementation as RSC network architecture evolves

6. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S6 Hardware Multiprocessing Model Reconfigurable Processing Module (RPM) –Application FPGA logic capacity (after TMR) Two CPUs, support HW, system interconnect Custom processing HW and IO cores –512MB shared EDAC DRAM Multiprocessing options –SMP Linux –Dual UP Linux (shared memory) –UP Linux + custom coprocessor –UP Linux + I/O processor –…

7. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S7 Hardware Multiprocessing Model 3.3V PCI 33MHz 32/64 bit Flash SDRAM On Chip Bus (Wishbone) On-Chip Peripheral Bus SLiP I/F PCI I/F Memory I/F NIC Caches CPU0 CPU1 Application FPGA (Xilinx) Interface FPGA (Actel) Bus I/F On-Chip Peripheral Bus I/O core(s) Custom core Timer / INTC/ … Timer / INTC/ … I/O core(s) Custom core Custom core Custom core

8. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S8 Status and outlook OS and multiprocessing prototyping –COTS FPGA eval board Insight-Memec V4LX25 + comms module Dual ethernet, uart 64MB DDR UP Linux reference design completed SMP feasibility study underway Dual UP Linux –Dual MicroBlaze HW system built –Dual kernel bringup underway MPICH2 port in progress –MPICH libraries integrated into uClinux build –Preliminary port of cluster process manager daemon

9. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S9 Status and outlook COTS prototype cluster 4 x dual CPU subsystems

10. RSC Williams MAPLD 2005/BOF-S10 Research questions Impact of TMR on performance How to represent custom HW in an MPI cluster –Coprocessor to CPU nodes? –Fully fledged MPI nodes / peers? Application of standard Linux technologies for reliability and survivability –RAID ramdisks –Cluster node failover Performance modeling and analysis –Rob Jones, RSC Co-I