HSAemu 2.0

Abstract

With the increasing computing complexity and the proliferation of data, the world demands efficient, next-generation system architecture to enable large-scale applications at acceptable costs. Heterogeneous computing has become a hot topic and a solution to achieve the goals of high performance and efficient power consumption, especially when graphical processing units (GPU's) are constantly integrated into systems-on-chips (SoC's) and are widely used for mobile devices. Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) is a series of standards provided by the HSA Foundation and designed to support heterogeneous computing, including runtime software and hardware specifications. To support the development and optimization of HSA-compliant systems and applications, we developed a full-system emulator, called HSAemu 2.0, which meets the latest HSA 1.0 system specifications and supports application development with OpenCL 2.0 features, such as shared virtual memory, device enqueue and pipe. As a hardware/software co-design tool, HSAemu 2.0 not only supports the development of heterogeneous applications, but also assists system vendors in designing and evaluating the HSA runtime libraries, HSAIL compiler, and HSA hardware.