English

MemPool Flavors: Between Versatility and Specialization in a RISC-V Manycore Cluster

Hardware Architecture 2025-04-08 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

As computational paradigms evolve, applications such as attention-based models, wireless telecommunications, and computer vision impose increasingly challenging requirements on computer architectures: significant memory footprints and computing resources are demanded while maintaining flexibility and programmability at a low power budget. Thanks to their advantageous trade-offs, shared-L1-memory clusters have become a common building block of massively parallel computing architectures tackling these issues. MemPool is an open-source, RISC-V-based manycore cluster scaling up to 1024 processing elements (PEs). MemPool offers a scalable, extensible, and programmable solution to the challenges of shared-L1 clusters, establishing itself as an open-source research platform for architectural variants covering a wide trade-off space between versatility and performance. As a demonstration, this paper compares the three main MemPool flavors, Baseline MemPool, Systolic MemPool, and Vectorial MemPool, detailing their architecture, targets, and achieved trade-offs.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2504.03675,
  title  = {MemPool Flavors: Between Versatility and Specialization in a RISC-V Manycore Cluster},
  author = {Sergio Mazzola and Yichao Zhang and Marco Bertuletti and Diyou Shen and Luca Benini},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.03675},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T22:47:17.548Z