A Message-Passing Hardware/Software Cosimulation Environment for Reconfigurable Computing Systems

High-Performance Reconfigurable Computers (HPRCs) provide a mix of standard processors and FPGAs to collectively accelerate applications. This introduces new design challenges, such as the need for portable programming models across HPRCs and system-level verification tools. To address the need for cosimulating a complete heterogeneous application using both software and hardware in an HPRC, the authors have created a tool called the Message-passing Simulation Framework (MSF). They have used it to simulate and develop an interface enabling an MPI-based approach to exchange data between X86 processors and hardware engines inside FPGAs.