EURETILE · European Reference Tiled Architecture Experiment

EURETILE investigates and implements brain-inspired and fault-tolerant foundational innovations to the system architecture of massively parallel tiled computer architectures and the corresponding programming paradigm. The execution targets are a many-tile HW platform, and a many-tile simulator. A set of SW process - HW tile mapping candidates is generated by the holistic SW tool-chain using a combination of analytic and bio-inspired methods. The Hardware dependent Software is then generated, providing OS services with maximum efficiency/minimal overhead. The many-tile simulator collects profiling data, closing the loop of the SW tool chain. Fine-grain parallelism inside processes is exploited by optimized intra-tile compilation techniques, but the project focus is above the level of the elementary tile. The elementary HW tile is a multi-processor, which includes a fault tolerant Distributed Network Processor (for inter-tile communication) and ASIP accelerators. Furthermore, EURETILE investigates and implements the innovations for equipping the elementary HW tile with high-bandwidth, low-latency brain-like inter-tile communication emulating 3 levels of connection hierarchy, namely neural columns, cortical areas and cortex, and develops a dedicated cortical simulation benchmark: DPSNN-STDP (Distributed Polychronous Spiking Neural Net with synaptic Spiking Time Dependent Plasticity). EURETILE leverages on the multi-tile HW paradigm and SW tool-chain developed by the FET-ACA SHAPES Integrated Project (2006-2009).