Research group working on open source GPU

At the Hot Chips conference, a research group from the University of Wisconsin presented plans to create an open source GPU called Miaow. The gpgpu is based on the Southern Islands-isa from AMD.

One of the main reasons for developing Miaow is the idea that software simulations running on certain hardware often cannot be modified well enough to get even better performance from a simulation. The research group called the Vertical Research Group believes that the Miaow will allow them to develop a product that can better perform specific gpgpu tasks, because more direct access to the hardware can be provided.

The gpgpu presented Thursday uses, among other things, a subset of AMD’s Southern Island-isa or instruction set architecture. AMD uses this instruction set for its own GPUs and it can run OpenCL code. According to The Platform, the performance seems ‘impressive’ compared to existing GPU results.

Whether that will quickly lead to own chip production does not seem to be an issue yet, especially because the intellectual property of various companies is being infringed. This is partly due to the fact that the entire project runs on a variant of AMD’s isa. That is why team leader Karu Sankaralingam states that for such open source hardware projects it is important to focus on innovation on top of the hardware used as the base. So far AMD has not been involved in the project except for a few who have “provided some additional insight into architectural elements.”

As a research project, it demonstrates that it is possible with a small group of just five people on hardware design and only a few people on compiler design, layout and fpga, to create a functioning open source GPU implementation within 36 months. . The gpu can run non-custom OpenCL programs.

The Miaow GPU coprocessor can control up to 32 computing units. Each computing unit is linked to the memory controller via L2 cache, after which the device memory is accessed. The host processor sends information to the GPU and a dispatcher. All this is placed on an fpga and tested. Several designs have been created using the Miaow design.

The Miaow GPUs can only be used as calculation units and cannot display graphic images on a screen. The project can be found on GitHub.