Automatic compilation of loops to exploit operator parallelism on configurable arithmetic logic units

Abstract

Configurable arithmetic logic units (ALUs) offer opportunities for adapting the underlying hardware to support the varying amount of parallelism in the computation. The problem of identifying the optimal parallel configurations (a configuration is defined as a given hardware implementation of different operators along with their multiplicities) at different steps in a program is a very complex issue but, if solved, allows the power of these ALUs to be maximally used. This paper focuses on developing an automatic compilation framework for configuration analysis to exploit operator parallelism within loop nests. The focus of this work is on performing configuration analysis to minimize costly reconfiguration overheads. In our framework, we initially carry out some operator and loop transformations to expose more opportunities for configuration reuse. We then present a two pass solution. The first pass attempts to generate either maximal cutsets (a cutset is defined as a group of statements that execute under a given configuration) or maximally parallel configurations by performing an analysis on the program dependency graph (PDG) of a loop nest. The second pass analyzes the trade-offs between the costs and benefits of reconfigurations across different cutsets and attempts to eliminate the reconfiguration overheads by merging cutsets. This methodology is implemented in the SUIF compilation system and is tested using some loops extracted from Perfect benchmarks and Livermore kernels. Good speedups are obtained, showing the merit of the proposed method. The method also scales well with the loop sizes and the amount of space available on FPGAs for configurable logic.