The goal of this project is to develop a flexible multi-core hardware test-bed on field programmable gate array (FPGA) that can be used to effectively validate the theoretical research on multi-core computing, especially for the power/thermal aware computing. Based on a commercial FPGA test platform, i.e. Xilinx Virtex5 XUPV5 LX110T, we develop a homogeneous multi-core test-bed with four software cores, each of which can dynamically adjust its performance using software. We also enhance the operating system support for this test platform with the development of hardware and software primitives that are useful in dealing with inter-process communication, synchronization, and scheduling for processes on multiple cores. An application based on matrix addition and multiplication on multi-core is implemented to validate the applicability of the test bed.
