Running Test Programs on Gemmini Simulators

We built an environment for Chipyard, a RISC-V SoC design framework, created simulators for Gemmini, a DNN accelerator, and ran the test programs gemmini-rocc-tests.

Click here for related articles.

• Running Test Programs on Gemmini Simulators (this article)
• Running ResNet-50 on FPGA with Gemmini SoC
• Running ONNX Model on FPGA with Gemmini SoC

Chipyard

Chipyard is an agile RISC-V SoC design framework being developed by the University of California, Berkeley (UCB).
Chipyard includes RISC-V CPUs such as Rocket and BOOM, accelerators, and more.

Gemmini

Gemmini is one of the RTL generators included in Chipyard and can generate a systolic array based DNN accelerator.
You can configure an SoC by combining a RISC-V CPU Rocket or BOOM with a Gemmini.

Gemmini Simulator

Gemmini has several simulators. This time we have created the following simulators.

• Spike: Functional Simulator
• Verilator: Cycle-Accurate Simulator

The functional simulator Spike has an extension for Gemmini.

Running Test Programs on Spike

We ran ResNet-50 using Spike as follows:

$ cd $CHIPYARD_ROOT/generators/gemmini
$ ./scripts/run-spike.sh resnet50
...
Prediction: 75 (score: 45)
Prediction: 900 (score: 43)
Prediction: 641 (score: 40)
Prediction: 897 (score: 57)

Total cycles: 4958105 (100%)
Matmul cycles: 695733 (14%)
Im2col cycles: 0 (0%)
Conv cycles: 1769030 (35%)
Pooling cycles: 0 (0%)
Depthwise convolution cycles: 0 (0%)
Res add cycles: 2398040 (48%)
Other cycles: 95302 (1%)
PASS

Running Test Programs on Verilator

We ran conv_first_layer using Verilator as follows:

$ cd $CHIPYARD_ROOT/generators/gemmini
$ ./scripts/run-verilator.sh conv_first_layer
This emulator compiled with JTAG Remote Bitbang client. To enable, use +jtag_rbb_enable=1.
Listening on port 33079
[UART] UART0 is here (stdin/stdout).
Output dimension: 9

Randomize inputs...
Randomize weights...
Randomize bias...
CPU conv...
CPU conv took 2238789 cycles
Flatten weights...
Gemmini conv...
Gemmini conv took 1796 cycles

Summary

We built an environment for Chipyard, created simulators for Gemmini, a DNN accelerator, and ran the test programs gemmini-rocc-tests.