Hardware support for thread synchronisation in an experimental manycore system

摘要

This paper deals with the problem of thread synchronisation in manycore systems. In particular, it considers the open-source GPU-like architecture developed within the MANGO H2020 project. The thread synchronisation hardware relies on a distributed master and on a lightweight control unit to be deployed within the core. It does not rely on memory access for exchanging synchronisation information since it uses hardware-level messages. The solution supports multiple barriers for different application kernels possibly being executed simultaneously. The results for different NoC sizes provide indications about the reduced synchronisation times and area overheads incurred by our solution.