HeteroSim: A Heterogeneous CPU-FPGA Simulator

Heterogeneous Computing is a promising direction to address the challenges of performance and power walls in high-performance computing, where CPU-FPGA architectures are particularly promising for application acceleration. However, the development of such architectures associated with optimal memory hierarchies is challenging due to the absence of an integrated simulator to support full system simulation and architectural exploration. In this work, we present HeteroSim, a full system simulator supporting x86 multi-cores integrated with an FPGA via bus connection. It can support fast architectural exploration with respect to number of cores, number of accelerated kernels on FPGA, and different memory hierarchies between CPU and FPGA. Various performance metrics are returned for further performance analysis and architectural configuration optimization.