EASY: efficient arbiter SYnthesis from multi-threaded code
File(s)JianyiFPGA19.pdf (980.4 KB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Cheng, Jianyi
Fleming, Shane
Chen, Yu Ting
Anderson, Jason
Constantinides, George
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools automatically transform a high-level specification of a circuit into a low-level RTL description.Traditionally, HLS tools have operated on sequential code, howeverin recent years there has been a drive to synthesize multi-threadedcode. A major challenge facing HLS tools in this context is how toautomatically partition memory amongst parallel threads to fullyexploit the bandwidth available on an FPGA device and avoid mem-ory contention. Current automatic memory partitioning techniqueshave inefficient arbitration due to conservative assumptions regard-ing which threads may access a given memory bank. In this paper,we address this problem through formal verification techniques,permitting a less conservative, yet provably correct circuit to begenerated. We perform a static analysis on the code to determinewhich memory banks are shared by which threads. This analysisenables us to optimize the arbitration efficiency of the generatedcircuit. We apply our approach to the LegUp HLS tool and showthat for a set of typical application benchmarks we can achieve upto 87% area savings, and 39% execution time improvement, withlittle additional compilation time.
Date Issued
2019-02
Date Acceptance
2018-11-15
Citation
2019, pp.142-151
Publisher
ACM
Start Page
142
End Page
151
Copyright Statement
© 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.
Sponsor
Royal Academy Of Engineering
Imagination Technologies Ltd
Engineering & Physical Science Research Council (EPSRC)
Identifier
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3289602.3293899
Grant Number
Prof Constantinides Chair
Prof Constantinides Chair
EP/P010040/1
Source
27th ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2019-02-24
Finish Date
2019-02-26
Coverage Spatial
California, USA
Date Publish Online
2019-02