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CGRA-ME at DATE 2024!

The CGRA-ME team will be presenting an embedded tutorial at DATE24 (Design, Automation and Test in Europe) on Tuesday, 26 March from 08:30 CEST - 10:00 CEST.

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Date Time Location
Tuesday, 26 March 08:30 CEST - 10:00 CEST Break-Out Room S3+4
Abstract

Coarse-grained reconfigurable arrays (CGRAs) are programmable hardware devices within the broader umbrella of reconfigurable architectures. They are promising candidates for the realization of application accelerators. In contrast to FPGAs, CGRAs are configurable at the word level, rather than the bit level. This distinction positions CGRAs to deliver power, performance, and area characteristics more closely aligned with custom ASICs. Notably, the emergence of numerous machine-learning accelerator startups, such as Tenstorrent, Groq, Cerebras, and SambaNova, offer architectures that closely resemble CGRAs.

CGRA-ME is an open-source CGRA modeling and exploration framework actively being developed at the University of Toronto. CGRA-ME is intended to facilitate research on new CGRA architectures and new CAD algorithms. Given the current surge in research interest in CGRAs from both industry and academia, this tutorial aims to provide valuable insights and practical guidance in this dynamic field.

Hands on session

The embedded tutorial will include a 45 minute hands on session where, guided by the instructors, tutorial participants will learn about CGRA mapping and how architectures are modeled and can be extended/altered within the open-source CGRA-ME framework. Participants will get experience mapping applications to a CGRA architecture and simulating the CGRA implementing the applcation. Participants will then learn how to modified the CGRA architecture and assess the impacts of their modification, such as viewing the change on the application mappability.

Speakers