El Correo Libre Issue 8

-Julius Baxter, Director, Free and Open Source Silicon (FOSSi) Foundation

The team behind the Parallel Ultra-Low Power (PULP) Platform has officially unveiled the project’s latest design: HERO, an open heterogeneous research platform based on a RISC-V many-core accelerator.

“HERO combines a PULP-based open-source parallel many-core accelerator implemented on FPGA with a hard ARM Cortex-A multicore host processor running full-stack Linux,” the team explains. “HERO is the first heterogeneous system architecture that mixes a powerful ARM multi-core host with a highly parallel and scalable many-core accelerator based on RISC-V cores.

“HERO offers a complete hardware and software platform which advances the state of the art of transparent accelerator programming using the OpenMP v4.5 Accelerator Model. The programmer writes a single application source file for the host and uses OpenMP directives for parallelisation and accelerator offloading. Lower-level details such as differing ISAs as well as shared virtual memory (SVM) between host and accelerator are handled by our heterogeneous toolchain based on GCC 7, runtime libraries, kernel driver and our open-source hardware IPs. As such, HERO greatly simplifies heterogeneous systems programming and forms a complete basis for future system-level research and industrial design comprising both the hardware and software side of heterogeneous systems.”

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