Firesim for Alveo boards

[Jeff Young]

Hi all,

I realize that AWS does not currently support many Alveo instances, but are there any plans to support Alveo U250/U280 boards for Firesim in the near future? Are there any key challenges in migrating from the UltraScale+ VU9P platform to Alveo and newer boards?

We have some students looking at trying to run this locally on some Alveo U280 boards we have, and I'd love to collaborate with anyone working on this topic.

Thanks,
Jeff Young (Georgia Tech research scientist)

[David Biancolin]

Hey Jeff, 

Thanks for your interest in FireSim. :)  We have some U250s of our own here. I've started looking into bringing them but until i'm done with my dissertation I won't have a chance to get it. There's been lots of  interest from others outside of Berkeley for Alveo boards, and it shouldn't be too hard to port them from AWS. There are a bunch of gotchas and assumptions-of-AWSness that need to be worked through though, which is to say once we have the first alveo board done i'm hoping it will be very easy to add another. 

If you'd like to give it a go anyways, in some other posts on the firesim group i've described what would be required to do this for a new FPGA. There's also this PR, https://github.com/firesim/firesim/pull/583, in which i do some of the initial legwork for zynq.  However, if I were you I'd sit tight for another month or so until we locally figure out our steps for Alveo

- David 

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[Jiuyang Liu]

Hi, David.

I'm trying to work on FireSim recently, however accessing AWS from my side is a little bit frustrating. So I'm trying to get FireSim offline. I need some suggestions from you.

1. Is Arm SoC imperative? I have VU9P and KU040 and other big FPGA boards, but no US+ boards, is it possible to use FireSim with these boards?

2. If arm core is compulsory, can you tell me why? and is there any workaround from this?

3. I'm very interested in making this happen, and will spend 60% of my time on this, would you mind giving me some suggestions? 

Thanks,

Jiuyang

[Jeff Young]

To follow along with the conversation here - Thank you, David; I'll check out the Firesim posts and the PR for Zynq porting you mentioned for more information. It's great to hear that Alveo support is planned in the near future as well!

Jiuyang - it seems like the Arm SoC might not be imperative since the AWS boards (US VU9P) do not have Arm SoC as far as I know, but David or others here might have more insight. Traditionally RISC-V systems have needed to run in tethered mode with a host Arm core, but I think that's less of a requirement lately.

--Jeff

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[David Biancolin]

Yeah, no embedded microprocessor is required. Berkeley's RISC-V systems _are_ still tethered like the original ones (they still use FESVR), it's just that FESVR runs from the x86 host behind PCIE in FireSim. Though there's no reason you couldn't support a standalone system in FireSim. 

- David

[Jiuyang Liu]

I'm trying to get firesim compile in my local environment, which seems to be a
big issue with dependency hell, build script and deploy scripts are too
coupled together, here are my todolist:

1. Compile it with a standalone mill/sbt with Chisel/RocketChip as dependency
2. Emit a minimal design with single rocket-core
3. Use CMake to compile host codes.
4. Run with latest kernel(5.11.7) with XDMA kmods

Thanks Jiuyang

[David Biancolin]

Hey Jiuyang,

I'll be the first to admit the build system is a little Frankenstien, but a wholesale re-implementation using mill & CMake is probably untenable right now. I'm open to doing that more iteratively over a longer period of time though. Would you be interested in having a meeting in which i could go over your goals with you, and explain where you might encounter some challenges? 

- David 

[Jiuyang Liu]

Hi, David,

On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 5:22:23 PM UTC David Biancolin wrote:
> Hey Jiuyang,
>
> I'll be the first to admit the build system is a little Frankenstien, but a
> wholesale re-implementation using mill & CMake is probably untenable right
> now.

Yes, I know, I would not change Build system related to this project recently.
All build system is on my own side, so my PR only contains codes change that
makes firesim be able to compile with chisel master. Since I'm building from
Chisel3/FIRRTL master source, so there might be some compatibility codes fix to
upstream(but not too much, thanks Jack.)
As you can see from here:
https://github.com/sequencer/chipsalliance-playground/blob/
6773cea5ad79751dd6aeac7fe0a5f5ef91ef9bd7/build.sc#L112-L138
Until you permitted, I won't touch the build system of upstream(I still don't
understand it yet ;p).

> I'm open to doing that more iteratively over a longer period of time
> though. Would you be interested in having a meeting in which i could go
> over your goals with you, and explain where you might encounter some
> challenges?

I'm free every 11am - 19am PST, willing to have a meeting with you!

Thanks,
Jiuyang

[David Biancolin]

On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 at 11:39:01 AM UTC-7 Jiuyang Liu wrote:

Hi, David,

On Tuesday, March 23, 2021 5:22:23 PM UTC David Biancolin wrote:
> Hey Jiuyang,
>
> I'll be the first to admit the build system is a little Frankenstien, but a
> wholesale re-implementation using mill & CMake is probably untenable right
> now.
Yes, I know, I would not change Build system related to this project recently.
All build system is on my own side, so my PR only contains codes change that
makes firesim be able to compile with chisel master. Since I'm building from
Chisel3/FIRRTL master source, so there might be some compatibility codes fix to
upstream(but not too much, thanks Jack.)

Ah, cool cool.  

As you can see from here:
https://github.com/sequencer/chipsalliance-playground/blob/
6773cea5ad79751dd6aeac7fe0a5f5ef91ef9bd7/build.sc#L112-L138
Until you permitted, I won't touch the build system of upstream(I still don't
understand it yet ;p).

> I'm open to doing that more iteratively over a longer period of time
> though. Would you be interested in having a meeting in which i could go
> over your goals with you, and explain where you might encounter some
> challenges?
I'm free every 11am - 19am PST, willing to have a meeting with you!

I'll email you.