XGRID: A Scalable Many-Core Embedded Processor

The demand for compute cycles needed by embedded systems is rapidly increasing. In this paper, we introduce the XGRID embedded many-core system-on-chip architecture. XGRID makes use of a novel, FPGA-like, programmable interconnect infrastructure, offering scalability and deterministic communication using hardware supported message passing among cores. Our experiments with XGRID are very encouraging. A number of parallel benchmarks are evaluated on the XGRID processor using the application mapping technique described in this work. We have validated our scalability claim by running our benchmarks on XGRID varying in core count. We have also validated our assertions on XGRID architecture by comparing XGRID against the Graphite many-core architecture and have shown that XGRID outperforms Graphite in performance.