Tinkering with CAPI

CAPI (Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface) is an exciting technology that should allow developers to more easily design applications that utilize a FPGA accelerator. This article documents my initial spelunking into this technology.

A little context

FPGAs

This is my first foray into tinkering with FPGAs and digital logic design in general. For those unfamiliar with this technology, an FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) is a type of integrated circuit that essentially allows software defined hardware. For the designer it’s almost like a pile of digital logic gates and some mechanisms that allow you to define how they are connected together. With this technology, and the appropriate skill sets, the FPGA can be programmed to act like nearly any piece of digital hardware.

Accelerators

An accelerator is used kind of like a co-proccessor that can be used to hardware implement computationally expensive algorithms. The idea is that instead of processing something on the general purpose CPU in your computer you delegate processing to a piece of hardware designed specifically for the task at hand; somewhat similar to using a GPU for 3D rendering. In my first couple projects my goal is to make something more functional than practical.

CAPI

CAPI is a technology that should allow me to focus on the interesting parts of designing an accelerated application. Instead of worrying about how I’m going to communicate between code running in a Linux userspace application and custom piece of hardware, I get to focus my efforts on the application and the hardware itself!

To run it on real gear you’ll need a POWER8-based server, for me the plan is to tinker with this on the Barreleye server that I play with work on for Rackspace. To make this more accessible to other developers I will focus mostly on my design process and simulation on my x86_64 workstation.

My simulation environment

For my initial testbed I’m using Xubuntu 15.10 on my laptop and the Quartus Prime design software.

If you want to set this up for yourself I recommend you grab the flavor of Ubuntu that you like the most and install the Quartus Prime software. I’m using the 30-day Evaluation of Quartus Prime Standard Edition, but I believe the free Lite Edition would suffice for this tinkering as well. Elect to install ModelSim Starter Edition as part of the Quartus installation process.

Moar CAPI talk and terminology

Nallatech offers a CAPI developer kit and provides a copy of the CAPI User’s Manual. This manual describes a lot of the core components that make up the CAPI systems.

An important part of the CAPI system on the FPGA side of things is the POWER Service Layer (PSL), which helps create the bridge between your custom hardware and userspace application. The accelerator itself is referred to as a Accelerator Function Unit (AFU) in the context of CAPI, this is the part I am most interested in designing.

On the userspace side of things, libcxl is the library you include in your application to communicate with the PSL and the AFU(s) behind it.

The Power Service Layer Simulation Engine (pslse) can be used to help design and test this technology without the need for the physical gear. In the next few bits I’ll outline the process I have taken to set this up on my machine and run a sample project.

Building and setting up PSLSE

First, clone down the pslse repo from github

git clone https://github.com/ibm-capi/pslse

Build the AFU driver

The AFU driver is used by ModelSim to transmit signals between a simulated design and a running instance of PSLSE. To build it you’ll need to find the vpi_user.h header included in your ModelSim installation. For me this is located in /home/$USER/altera/15.1/modelsim_ase/include/. You’ll also need to compile for 32bit as ModelSim is a 32bit application.

cd pslse/afu_driver/src/
export VPI_USER_H_DIR="/home/$USER/altera/15.1/modelsim_ase/include/"
BIT32=y make

If you get an error about not finding a cdefs.h header, you’ll just need to install the libc6-dev-i386 package.

You can run file veriuser.sl to verify it generated a ELF 32-bit LSB shared object.

Build pslse itself

PSLSE has a straight forward build process, just make sure to build this for 32bit use as well.

cd ../../pslse/
BIT32=y make

Build libcxl from pslse repo

There is a variant of libcxl inside of the PSLSE repo that is modified for use in a simulated environment. This can be compiled for 64bit architecture as it communicates with the pslse over a socket.

cd ../libcxl/
make

Memcopy example project

IBM has a downloadable Memcopy Demo you can find here to test your setup. The next couple steps will outline the process I’ve taken to run this sample project.

Create new Quartus project

In Quartus, go to File->New Project Wizard.... If you get the introduction screen, click next to get to the Directory, Name, Top-Level Entity page. Set the working project directory to a new directory to store the project files, I named my directory memcopy-example. I also named my project memcopy-example. After naming the project the top level design entity field will mimic the project name, but for this project we’ll use top as our top level entity to match the top.v file provided in the pslse repo. After filling in those fields you can hit Finish to exit the wizard.

Copy files into project directory

From the pslse repo, copy afu_driver/verilog/top.v into your new project directory.

From the MemcopyDemoKit.tar.gz archive, copy all the files in capi-memcpy/memcpy/ into your project directory.

Synthesize and start simulation

Press Ctrl+k or go to Processing->Start->Start Analysis & Synthesis to build the project. When complete the bottom message area should say something like Quartus Prime Analysis & Synthesis was successful. 0 errors, 57 warnings and you’ll see a green check next to Analysis & Elaboration in the tasks window.

Next, go to Tools->Run Simulation Tool->RTL Simulation to open ModelSim. On my box this initially gave me an error about some license file stuff, even though I was using the free version of ModelSim. I followed this helpful post to fix the missing dependencies.

Point ModelSim to the pslse veriuser.sl

When ModelSim starts it will create simulation/modelsim/modelsim.ini in your Quartus project directory. Open this file and search for Veriuser. Add a line to this file that sets Veriuser to a path to the veriuser.sl you compiled within the afu_driver/src directory of the pslse repo. Example below:

Veriuser = /tmp/pslse/afu_driver/src/veriuser.sl

Back in ModelSim, go to Compile->Compile Options and hit OK so that ModelSim will reload the configuration. Unfortunately, this file is overwritten when you open ModelSim later, so you’ll need to do this each time you open ModelSim unless you modify the template at ~/altera/15.1/modelsim_ase/modelsim.ini, which would affect all of your Quartus projects.

Power up the AFU

In ModelSim, go to Simulate->Start Simulation. In the window that comes up, expand the work node, select the top module and hit OK.

Once started, the Transcript box should end with something like Errors: 0, Warnings: 0. If you do get an error, it might be because the veriuser.sl was compiled for 64bit architecture but is being loaded by a 32bit application.

Now that the simulation is prepared, we can run it via Simulate->Run->Continue. After a short bit ModelSim should output a message in the transcript that reads something like # AFU Server is waiting for connection on localhost:32768 and ModelSim might appear to freeze up, though it actually seems to be blocking on a connection attempt.

Open a terminal and go into the pslse/ directory within the pslse repo. Check shim_host.dat to make sure the port matches what the AFU server is waiting on. Then kick off the pslse server with ./pslse. Once ModelSim connects, the window should become responsive again. Within ModelSim, use Simulate->Run->All to keep the simulation going.

In the terminal you have pslse running you should get some output like this:

INFO:PSLSE version 1.002 compiled @ Jan 11 2016 11:00:04
INFO:PSLSE parm values:
    Seed     = 13
    Timeout  = 10 seconds
    Response = 16%
    Paged    = 3%
    Reorder  = 86%
    Buffer   = 82%
INFO:Attempting to connect AFU: afu0.0 @ localhost:32768
PSL_SOCKET: Using PSL protocol level : 0.9908.0
INFO:Clocking afu0.0
INFO:Started PSLSE server, listening on localhost:16384
INFO:Stopping clocks to afu0.0

At this point, ModelSim and PSLSE are both ready for a userspace application to put them to good use.

Run the userspace application that utilizes the AFU

Go into the capi-memcpy folder extracted from the MemcopyDemoKit archive. Edit the Makefile included in this folder to set the PSLSE_DIR variable to the libcxl directory within the pslse repo. Run make to build the application.

Since the libcxl library isn’t installed to the systems library path, you will need to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH to the same path you pointed PSLSE_DIR to before the program will be able to run.

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/tmp/pslse/libcxl/ ./capi_memcpy

That should do it! My output is something like this (duplicate lines removed for brevity):

INFO:Connecting to host 'localhost' port 16384
Using seed 1452713916
Starting copy of 8192 bytes from 0x00000000015bc580 to 0x00000000015be600
Timeout after 1 seconds waiting for AFU to start
Command events:
0x000000002284d401:0x00000000015bc480:0x8000008000000000
0x0000000022: Tag:0x09,1 Command:0x0a00,1 Addr:0x00000000015bc480,1 abt:0 cch:0x0 size:128
0xffffffffff: Tag:0xff,1 Command:0x1fff,1 Addr:0xffffffffffffffff,1 abt:7 cch:0xffff size:4095

0xffffffffff: Tag:0xff,1 Command:0x1fff,1 Addr:0xffffffffffffffff,1 abt:7 cch:0xffff size:4095
0xffffffffff:
Response events:
0x000000002c: Tag:0x09,1 Code:0x08 credits:1
0xffffffffff: Tag:0xff,1 Code:0xff credits:7

0xffffffffff: Tag:0xff,1 Code:0xff credits:7
0xffffffffff:
Control events:
0x0000000002:0x0000000002: Done, Error:0x0000000000000000
0x0000000004:

Final thoughts

I’ve not fully wrapped my head around how this works nor verified if it’s actually copying blocks of memory as it alludes to, though it does appear to be a working setup. As I gain some more knowledge with VHDL/Verilog and the CAPI technology I hope to produce an easily understood breakdown of what is going on here and how a developer could dabble with their own designs. Stay tuned.

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