Exploration Flow

3. Exploration Flow#

3.1. Exploration Flow#

../_images/richie_exploration.png

Fig. 3.1 Exploration flow.#

During an exploration campaign, many platform variants are profiled to determine the most convenient one for a given application. The exploration flow thus consists of a sequence of hardware-software co-design stages, which are mostly automated ([auto]):

  1. Define a set of design-time knobs, meaning the desired platform parameters specified in the accelerator and platform specification files;

  2. [auto] Launch the generation flow to obtain a specialized instance of the Richie platform;

  3. [auto] Build the FPGA bitstream;

  4. Develop the SW application employing the heterogeneous stack and the OpenMP-based interface;

  5. [auto] Profile the generated platform instance and retrieve results (performance, area).

This procedure is repeated for all the platform descriptions (i.e., sets of knobs) that the user intends to consider.

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