gem5-accel: A Pre-RTL Simulation Toolchain for Accelerator Architecture Validation

Attaining the performance and efficiency levels required by modern applications often requires the use of application-specific accelerators. However, writing synthesizable Register-Transfer Level code for such accelerators is a complex, expensive, and time-consuming process, which is cumbersome for early architecture development phases. To tackle this issue, a pre-synthesis simulation toolchain is herein proposed that facilitates the early architectural evaluation of complex accelerators aggregated to multi-level memory hierarchies. To demonstrate its usefulness, the proposed gem5-accel is used to model a tensor accelerator based on Gemmini, showing that it can successfully anticipate the results of complex hardware accelerators executing deep Neural Networks.