REPTILES: Repeated Tiles of Sargantana, a RISC-V multicore based on OpenPiton
It provides an open-source, scalable multicore framework for academic HPC research, though improvements are incremental.
REPTILES is an open-source RISC-V multicore framework that interconnects Sargantana cores with OpenPiton's memory hierarchy, achieving a 3.1x average speedup with 4 cores and a 9.3x performance increase for vector addition.
Chip industry continues advancing and expanding modern computing systems, resulting in more complex multi-core processors. Conversely, academic projects face scalability challenges due to limited resources, highlighting the need for open-source frameworks that enable innovation and knowledge sharing. Recently, several open-source proposals have emerged, offering flexible and scalable designs, but fail to meet the performance demands of modern High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications. In this project, we present REPTILES, an open-source RISC-V multicore framework based on OpenPiton\thanks. REPTILES interconnects multiple Sargantana cores with the memory hierarchy of OpenPiton. Moreover, we present the new features incorporated in Sargantana and OpenPiton designs to improve the performance of HPC applications. We demonstrate that REPTILES presents suitable scalability, achieving a speedup of 3.1x on average with 4 cores. Additionally, we show that Sargantana's new features increase the performance of vector addition benchmark in a 9.3x.