Makinote: An FPGA-Based HW/SW Platform for Pre-Silicon Emulation of RISC-V Designs

Abstract

Makinote is a massive, FPGA-based hardware/software platform developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center for high-speed, pre-silicon emulation of complex RISC-V designs. Composed of 96 AMD/Xilinx Alveo U55c FPGAs, the cluster can emulate designs up to 750 million ASIC cells, facilitated by an easy-to-use FPGA shell that automates multi-FPGA connectivity. Experimental validation demonstrated significant scaling, achieving an 8x performance boost when running HPC Challenge applications across 32 FPGAs compared to a single-FPGA setup.

Report

Key Highlights

• Massive Scale Emulation: Makinote is a high-performance cluster platform specifically designed for pre-silicon emulation of large-scale Register Transfer Level (RTL) designs, supporting up to 750 million equivalent ASIC cells.
• RISC-V Focus: The platform is optimized with specific drivers and tools to facilitate the emulation and verification of complex RISC-V based architectures.
• Simplified Multi-FPGA Use: A crucial innovation is the FPGA shell software, which provides an easy-to-use interface to port designs and automatically manages complex interconnections required across multiple FPGAs.
• High Performance Scaling: Validation tests running the HPC Challenge application across 32 FPGAs resulted in an 8-fold performance improvement compared to using a single FPGA.

Technical Details

• Hardware Composition: The Makinote cluster utilizes 96 individual AMD/Xilinx Alveo U55c FPGAs.
• Cluster Location: The platform is hosted at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC-CNS).
• Emulation Capacity: Capable of emulating massive designs up to 750M ASIC cells.
• Automated Connectivity: The proposed FPGA shell automatically connects necessary high-speed ports, including:
  • PCIe Gen4
  • DRAM (DDR4 and HBM)
  • ETH 10g/100g
• Software Release: The associated toolset, including the FPGA shell, is released online for community extension and further utilization.

Implications

• Accelerated RISC-V Development: Makinote significantly accelerates the validation and verification cycle for large and complex RISC-V processor and accelerator designs prior to costly silicon tape-out.
• Lowering Development Barriers: The automated FPGA shell reduces the technical burden and effort required by RTL developers to partition and map massive designs across dozens of FPGAs, making large-scale emulation more accessible.
• Enabling HPC Research: By providing a highly scalable and performant emulation environment, Makinote supports cutting-edge research and experimentation for High-Performance Computing (HPC) applications utilizing custom RISC-V architectures.
• Open Ecosystem Support: Releasing the tool online encourages collaboration and adoption, strengthening the overall flexibility and maturity of the RISC-V hardware development ecosystem.