From Plasma to BeeFarm: Design experience of an FPGAbased multicore prototype

Abstract. In this paper, we take a MIPS-based open-source uniproces-sor soft core, Plasma, and extend it to obtain the Beefarm infrastruc-ture for FPGA-based multiprocessor emulation, a popular research topic of the last few years both in the FPGA and the computer architecture communities. We discuss various design tradeoffs and we demonstrate su-perior scalability through experimental results compared to traditional software instruction set simulators. Based on our experience of designing and building a complete FPGA-based multiprocessor emulation system that supports run-time and compiler infrastructure and on the actual executions of our experiments running Software Transactional Memory (STM) benchmarks, we comment on the pros, cons and future trends of using hardware-based emulation for research.