Research
Microthread Information and Register Visualization (MIRV) Tool - Old version
Newer Version
This is the old version of the MIRV tool; the new one can be found here.
Introduction
Hwacha is a decoupled vector-fetch data-parallel accelerator described by Lee et al. implemented for the RISC-V ISA. From the programmer's perspective, Hwacha operates with the concept of microthreads. Microthreads are units of computation that complete one operation in a vector of many elements. The programmer only needs to tell Hwacha how many integer registers and floating point registers to allocate for each microthread. They have just about every capability of a typical RISC-V core (e.g. Rocket). However, the implementation is very different. Hwacha, in its current implementation, allocates registers across 8 banks of 256 registers (of 65-66 bits each). The organization of registers can be confusing for beginners, hence this tool.
You can obtain more information on Hwacha by consulting its manual.
How to use this tool
First, specify the number of banks and the number of registers per bank. These are (presently) hard-coded values in Hwacha's implementation, but parameterization is underway.
Then, specify the number of integer registers and
floating-point registers that you will need to have. These are the arguments to
the vsetcfg
instruction. Note that you must have at least one
floating-point register. This tool does not quite capture the edge cases yet.
In CS 250, we developed an extension to Hwacha that would
allow it to support packing smaller-width floating-point values into the
floating-point registers. You can specify the precision/packing. This is the
argument to the vsetucfg
instruction, which sets the upper 20 or 52
bits of the register with the configuration information. (vsetcfg
is another way of setting the lower 12 bits, as in an immediate instruction,
with two numbers, the number of xregs and fregs.) The precision number is coded
as such:
Precision | Bits | vsetucfg
Encoding |
Double | 64 | 0 |
Single | 32 | 1 |
Half | 16 | 2 |
MIRV Interface
Visualization
(Enter some parameters and press "Update.")