ADD: Accelerator Design and Deploy ‐ A tool for FPGA high‐performance dataflow computing

Abstract

SummaryDataflow‐based FPGA accelerators have become a promising alternative to deliver energy‐efficient high‐performance computing. However, FPGA programming is still a challenge. This paper presents Accelerator Design and Deploy (ADD), a high‐level framework to specify, to simulate, and to implement dataflow accelerators for streaming applications. The framework includes an open dataflow operator library, and templates are provided to easily design new operators. The framework also provides a high‐level and an accurate simulation at circuit level with short execution times. Moreover, ADD provides software and hardware APIs to simplify the integration process, extending the benefits of portability from low‐cost FPGA boards to high performance datacenter FPGA platforms. Our framework supports coupling with high‐level programming languages, and it has been validated on two FPGA platforms: the Intel high‐performance CPU‐FPGA heterogeneous computing platform and an educational FPGA kit. We show that our simple approach presents competitive performance, both in time and energy, when compared to multi‐core and GPU accelerators.