DAEGEN: A Modular Compiler for Exploring Decoupled Spatial Accelerators

Abstract

Specialized hardware accelerators, particularly those that are programmable and flexible to target multiple problems in their domain, have proven to provide orders of magnitude speedup and energy efficiency. However, their design requires extensive manual effort, due to the need for hardware-software codesign to balance the degree and forms of specialization to the domains or program behaviors of interest. This article provides the first steps towards one approach for automating much of these processes. The insight behind our work is to recognize that decoupled spatial architectures both define a rich design space with many tradeoffs for different kinds of applications, and also can be composed out of a simple set of well-defined primitives. Therefore, we propose a modular accelerator design framework, DAEGEN, a.k.a. Decoupled Access Excution Accelerator Generator. This article defines an initial compiler and architecture primitives, and we discuss key challenges.