RAMP: Research Accelerator for Multiple Processors

John Wawrzynek

David A Patterson

Mark Oskin

Shih-Lien Lu

Christos Kozyrakis Stanford

James C Hoe

Derek Chiou

Krste Asanovic

IEEE Micro, 2007


Abstract

The RAMP project’s goal is to enable the intensive, multidisciplinary innovation needed to address parallel processing. RAMP is an open-source, community-developed, FPGA-based emulator of parallel architectures whose design framework lets researchers develop and contribute reusable, composable modules. Three complete designs for transactional memory, distributed systems, and distributed shared memory demonstrate the platform’s potential.