Extending FPGA based teaching boards into the area of distributed memory multiprocessors

Abstract

Reconfigurable hardware, in conjunction with soft-CPUs, has increasingly established itself in computer architecture education. In this paper we expand this approach into the area of distributed memory multi-processor systems.Arguments that supported the introduction of reconfigurable hardware as a substitute for commodity CPUs on educational computer architecture boards are equally applicable to teaching hardware that facilitates the construction and configuration of multiprocessor systems.The IEEE Standard for the Scalable Coherent Interface (SCI) was chosen as the interconnect technology because it enables the demonstration of the most important architecture concepts in this context. This interconnect exhibits high bandwidth and low latencies and not only specifies a hardware Distributed Shared Memory (DSM) architecture, but also defines cache coherence protocols. Consequently an implementation of this standard allows the design of Non-Uniform Memory Access (NUMA) and cache-coherent NUMA (ccNUMA) multiprocessor systems.