A scalable wide-issue clustered VLIW with a reconfigurable interconnect

Clustered VLIW architectures have been widely adopted in modern embedded multimedia applications for their ability to exploit high degrees of ILP with reasonable trade-off in complexity and silicon costs. Studies have however shown limited performance scaling for wide-issue machines. In this paper we describe the architecture of a clustered VLIW with a runtime reconfigurable inter-cluster bus suitable to address such scalability problem. The architecture is aimed at kernel loops acceleration through a coprocessor approach and allows a customization of the interconnect between neighboring register files before each loop execution. We have adopted an inter-cluster communication mechanism based on a constant-complexity interconnect. The complexity and latency independent of the number of clusters preserve the scalability on issue-width. To handle the limited connectivity, the interconnection resources in the inter-cluster bus are exposed to the compiler, and scheduled like other resources with an adapted version of modulo scheduling. Other relevant features include the capability to define shifting queues in the register files, for a more effective software pipelining support. The addition of a limited amount of reconfigurability to the well established VLIW programming model results in low-overhead inter-cluster communications and a scalable ILP architecture. Simulation results show that we can achieve near linear scalability for certain classes of kernel loops.