Processor/memory/array size tradeoffs in the design of SIMD arrays for a spatially mapped workload

Abstract

Though massively parallel SIMD arrays continue to be promising for many computer vision applications, they have undergone few systematic empirical studies. The problems include the size of the architecture space, the lack of portability of the test programs, and the inherent complexity of simulating up to hundreds of thousands of processing elements. The latter two issues have been addressed previously, here we describe how spreadsheets and tk/tcl are used to endow our simulator with the flexibility to model a large variety of designs. The utility of this approach is shown in the second half of the paper where results are presented as to the performance of a large number of array size, datapath, register file, and application code combinations. The conclusions derived include the utility of multiplier and floating point support, the cost of virtual PE emulation, likely datapath/memory combinations, and overall designs with the most promising performance/chip area ratios.