In this poster, we introduce Harmonica, a customizable FPGA-hosted core for massively parallel data intensive applications, designed for use in the proposed Cymric processor-near-memory architecture. We also discuss the deployment of Harmonica in the Cymric prototype, its first use in a full FPGA-based system incorporating a memory hierarchy. Given the nascent state of processor-near-memory (PNM) architectures, Cymric has adopted an approach based on the ability to rapidly develop and analyze a space of potential architectural solutions. Harmonica facilitates this by providing both instruction set and microarchitecture level configurability, allowing the same core design to be used in widely varying applications. Core dimensions such as SIMD width and word size can be configured as well as the set of and types of functional units present. This flexibility is enabled by HARP, a family of instruction set architectures for SIMT cores, and CHDL, a C++-based environment used to describe the processor in lieu of a traditional HDL.
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