CSE590G: Architecture Seminar, Autumn 2012

Title: "CoRAM: An In-Fabric Memory Architecture for Portable and Scalable FPGA-Based Computing"

Abstract: FPGAs have been used in many applications to achieve orders-of-magnitude improvement in absolute performance and energy efficiency relative to conventional microprocessors. Despite their promise in both processing performance and efficiency, FPGAs have not yet gained widespread acceptance as mainstream computing devices. A fundamental obstacle to FPGA-based computing today is the FPGA's lack of a common, scalable memory architecture. When developing applications for FPGAs, designers are often directly responsible for crafting the application-specific memory hierarchy that manages and transports data to and from the processing kernels. This infrastructure not only increases design time and effort but will frequently lock a design to a particular FPGA product line, hindering scalability and portability. We propose a new FPGA memory architecture called Connected RAM (CoRAM) to serve as a portable bridge between the distributed computation kernels and the external memory interfaces. In addition to improving performance and efficiency, the CoRAM architecture provides a virtualized memory environment as seen by the hardware kernels to simplify development and to improve an application's portability and scalability.

Bio: Eric Chung is currently a post-doc at Microsoft Research Silicon Valley and received his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon in 2011. Eric is broadly interested in the scalability and programmability of future, energy-efficient computer architectures, spanning mobile devices to datacenter-scale computers. His goals are to: (1) identify and expand the role of specialized and programmable logic in future systems, and (2) to enable specialization for the "masses" by improving the architecture, portability, programmability, and debuggability of future specialized hardware. During his time at CMU, Eric led the CoRAM project, an effort to re-think the architecture of FPGAs for computing. He was also the project lead for ProtoFlex, which developed large-scale, full-system multiprocessor emulators using FPGAs.