SPARKLE: A 1,024-Core/16,384-Thread Single FPGA Many-Core RISC-V Barrel Processor Overlay
Riadh Ben Abdelhamid, Vladislav Válek, Dirk Koch · 2024
SPARKLE (Scalable Parallel Architecture for RISC-V Kernel-Level Execution) is a RISC-V many-core architecture for scalable parallel software processing, currently running at 400MHz on a Xilinx VU9P FPGA, including a PCIe backplane, with 1,024 cores and 16,384 hardware threads. SPARKLE is highly flexible, allowing various configurations. Its core, BRISKI (Barrel RISC- V for Kilo-core Implementations), operates at 650+ MHz in standalone mode and is one of the fastest barrel processor softcores, supporting full user-mode RV32I and additional instructions such as LRISC atomic instructions and CSRRS for hart ID retrieval.