PRiME releases another free software tool – “KOCL”
PRiME has made available another free, open source software tool developed as part of its research activities.
KOCL (“KAPow for OpenCL”) is PRiME’s automated tool flow for generating FPGA designs capable of accelerating OpenCL kernel execution whilst reporting their own power consumption. The tool was created by PRiME researchers at Imperial College as part of Research Theme 3 – Reconfigurable Architectures.
In a modern FPGA system-on-chip design, it is often insufficient to simply assess the total power consumption of the entire circuit by design-time estimation or runtime power rail measurement. Instead, to make better runtime decisions, it is desirable to understand the power consumed by each individual module in the system.
KOCL is a further refinement of the previously developed PRiME “KaPOW tool” – a loose acronym for ‘K’ounting Activity for Power estimation. KAPow combines board level power measurements with register-level activity counting to build a low overhead online model that produces a breakdown of power consumption per module within the design. KOCL requires no user exposure to, or understanding of, hardware, and enables easy access to live kernel-level power consumption from OpenCL host code. KaPOW research at Imperial College has previously won a best paper award at the 24th IEEE International Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines, held in May 2016 in Washington DC, USA
KOCL is available as free, open-source software (under GNU general public licence v3.0) and is available from: