HERO: an Open-Source Research Platform for HW/SW Exploration of Heterogeneous Manycore Systems

Heterogeneous systems on chip (HeSoCs) co-integrate a high-performance multicore host processor with programmable manycore accelerators (PMCAs) to combine “standard platform” software support (e.g. the Linux OS) with energy-efficient, domain-specific, highly parallel processing capabilities. In this work, we present HERO, a HeSoC platform that tackles this challenge in a novel way HERO’s host processor is an industry-standard ARM Cortex-A multicore complex, while its PMCA is a scalable, silicon-proven, open-source many-core processing engine, based on the extensible, open RISC-V ISA. We evaluate a prototype implementation of HERO, where the PMCA implemented on an FPGA fabric is coupled with a hard ARM Cortex-A host processor, and show that the run time overhead compared to manually written PMCA code operating on private physical memory is lower than 10 % for pivotal benchmarks and operating conditions. Thus, HERO demonstrates that ARM and RISC-V can productively coexist in a dual-ISA HW-SW platform