Hardware/Software Co-Design of Heterogeneous Manycore Architectures

In the era of big data, advanced sensing, and artificial intelligence, the required computation power is provided mostly by multicore and manycore architectures. However, the performance demand keeps growing. Thus the computer architectures need to continue evolving and provide higher performance. The applications, which are executed on the manycore architectures, are divided into several tasks to be mapped on separate cores and executed in parallel. Usually these tasks are not identical and may be executed more efficiently on different types of cores within a heterogeneous architecture. Therefore, we believe that the heterogeneous manycores are the next step for the computer architectures. However, there is a lack of knowledge on what form of heterogeneity is the best match for a given application or application domain. This knowledge can be acquired through designing these architectures and testing different design configurations. However, designing these architectures is a great challenge. Therefore, there is a need for an automated design method to facilitate the architecture design and design space exploration to gather knowledge on architectures with different configurations. Additionally, it is already difficult to program manycore architectures efficiently and this difficulty will only increase further with the introduction of heterogeneity due to the increase in the complexity of the architectures, unless this complexity is somehow hidden. There is a need for software development tools to facilitate the software development for these architectures and enable portability of the same software across different manycore platforms. In this thesis, we first address the challenges of the software development for manycore architectures. We evaluate a dataflow language (CAL) and a source-to-source compilation framework (Cal2Many) with several case studies in order to reveal their impact on productivity and performance of the software. The language supports task level parallelism by adopting actor model and the framework takes CAL code and generates implementations in the native language of several different architectures. In order to address the challenge of custom hardware development, we first evaluate a commercial manycore architecture namely Epiphany and identify its demerits. Then we study manycore architectures in order to reveal possible uses of heterogeneity in manycores and facilitate choice of architecture for software and hardware development. W