Cosmic Castle - DARPA Domain Specific Systems on a Chip

Cosmic Castle is a multi-level hardware-software strategy that is integrated by a cross-cutting performance modeling methodology, using our innovative Aspen modeling framework. Our innovative approach provides a methodology for projecting application ontologies onto programming systems, operating systems, and hardware. Specifically, Cosmic Castle develops solutions across the areas of 1) Vertically-integrated modeling of application requirements and architecture parameters using our Aspen framework; 2) Forming domain representations as ontologies using our Aspen application modeling language as a concrete method for characterizing and modeling applications; 3) Software tools to enable a development ecosystem that exercises the full capability of the highly programmable system, using Aspen models to inform decisions statically and dynamically; 4) Intelligent scheduling to manage the set of domain resources in the context of specific applications; 5) Medium access control (MAC) to interconnect the processing elements (PEs) and to allow the data throughput, taking into consideration latency, power, and other domain constraints; and 6) Hardware integration of the right set of PEs on the MAC layer with the intelligent scheduler and software into a fabricated DSSoC. Apart from domain-specific languages or extensions to existing languages, a key aspect of our approach is that we attempt to use existing programming models while developing the performance model to be as independent of the architecture as possible.

Cosmic Castle Architectural Overview

Integrated Cosmic Castle workflow for design, analysis, and execution including the innovative Performance Functional Unity (PFU) embedded in hardware