Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

One of the greatest challenges of FPGA is the crave for a platform, which runs a system, handles a software and co-ordinates exchange with peripherals. To explore this advantage on FPGA with energy efficiency, this work aims at developing multithreading on ARM cortex dual core A9 processor present in Zedboard FPGA. To enhance the speed of execution on this processor and to allow concurrency, multithreading is developed using intel thread building blocks(TBB) library which aids in creating task based parallelism on FPGA being the first of its kind. In the first step towards this process, the processor is booted with Ubuntu 12.04 linux operating system making it as a standalone processor. This system is enabled with graphical user interface using xillinux IP library FPGA code kit. To test the efficiency of multihreading on the processing system of Zedboard, an application known as 2D – raytracer is developed using the parallel-for loop scheduling method which aids in running all the iteration loops in the code into chunks and runs each chunk as a separate thread under intel TBB. In this application an image was parallelized by speculating each pixel running in parallel resulting in excellent speedup. The newly implemented multithreading achieves a speedup of 53% compared to sequential execution on the same processor. This method explores the flexibility of parallel processing on FPGA. 

Keywords: Dual Cortex A9 ARM(Advanced RISC machines) Processor, Field Programmable Gate Array(FPGA), Intel TBB(Thread Building Blocks), Software Development Kit(SDK), Xilinx Platform Studio(XPS), ZedBoard(Zynq Evaluation and Development Board)