Commercial High-level Synthesis Tool Research Articles

Leveraging Modern C++ in High-Level Synthesis

High-level synthesis (HLS) enables the automated conversion of high-level language algorithms into synthesizable register-transfer level code, allowing computation-intensive algorithms to be accelerated on FPGAs. Most HLS tools have C++ as their input language, as it is widely known in both software and hardware industry. However, even though C++ receives a new standard every three years, the HLS tool vendors have mostly provided support and examples using C++98/03. Limiting to early C++ standards imposes a productivity penalty, since the newer standards provide both compilation time reductions and more concise, expressive, and maintainable way of writing code. In this study, we make the case for adopting modern C++ in HLS. We inspect the language features of C++11 and forward, and consider their benefits for HLS. We also test the present support for the modern language features with two state-of-the-art commercial HLS tools. Finally, we provide an extended example, demonstrating the increased clarity of code achieved using the newer standards. We note that the investigated HLS tools already have good support for modern C++ features, and urge their adoption to increase designer productivity.

FastSim: A Fast Simulation Framework for High-Level Synthesis

High-level synthesis (HLS) is a well-established framework used to translate high-level algorithmic behaviors into hardware designs. Despite the enduring research efforts, a major prevailing bottleneck of HLS is the large gap between the design and verification processes. Presently, register transfer level (RTL) simulation is the primary platform used for HLS design verification. Although most of the state-of-the-art RTL simulators provide an abstracted user-friendly platform for verification, they are undesirably slow and sometimes incomprehensible to non-field-programmable gate array experts to debug. The alternative software simulators (C simulation) introduced by commercial HLS tools render faster simulation, but are not cycle accurate and are not capable to estimate design performance. In this article, we introduce an automatic cycle-accurate simulation tool, FastSim, that manipulates certain unique features of HLS design to extract a concise, well-indented, and debug-friendly C behavior from the synthesized RTL. Our simulation tool ensures RTL correctness, provides cycle accuracy, accurate performance estimation, and renders on an average around 300 times faster simulation compared to RTL simulators and comparable performance to that of software C simulators.

Learning from the Past: Efficient High-level Synthesis Design Space Exploration for FPGAs

The quest to democratize the use of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) has given High-Level Synthesis (HLS) the final push to be widely accepted with FPGA vendors strongly supporting this VLSI design methodology to expand the FPGA user base. HLS takes as input an untimed behavioral description and generates efficient RTL (Verilog or VHDL). One major advantage of HLS is that it allows us to generate a variety of different micro-architectures from the same behavioral description by simply specifying different combination of synthesis options. In particular, commercial HLS tools make extensive use of synthesize directives in the form pragmas. This strength is also a weakness as it forces HLS users to fully understand how these synthesis options work and how they interact to efficiently set them to get a hardware implementation with the desired characteristics. Luckily, this process can be automated. Unfortunately, the search space grows supra-linearly with the number of synthesis options. To address this, this work proposes an automatic synthesis option tuner dedicated for FPGAs. We have explored a larger number of behavioral descriptions targeting ASICs and FPGAs and found out that due to the internal structure of the FPGA a large number of synthesis options combinations never lead to a Pareto-optimal design and, hence, the search space can be drastically reduced. Moreover, we make use of large database of DSE results that we have generated since we started working in this field to further accelerate the exploration process. For this, we use a technique based on perceptual hashing that allows our proposed explorer to recognize similar program structures in the new description to be explored and match them with structures in our database. This allows us to directly retrieve the pragma settings that lead to Pareto-optimal configurations. Experimental results show that the search space can be accelerated substantially while leading to finding most of the Pareto-optimal designs.

FPGA Acceleration of 3GPP Channel Model Emulator for 5G New Radio

The channel model is by far the most computing intensive part of the link level simulations of multiple-input and multiple-output (MIMO) fifth-generation new radio (5G NR) communication systems. Simulation effort further increases when using more realistic geometry-based channel models, such as the three-dimensional spatial channel model (3D-SCM). Channel emulation is used for functional and performance verification of such models in the network planning phase. These models use multiple finite impulse response (FIR) filters and have a very high degree of parallelism which can be exploited for accelerated execution on Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) platforms. This paper proposes an efficient re-configurable implementation of the 3rd generation partnership project (3GPP) 3D-SCM on FPGAs using a design flow based on high-level synthesis (HLS). It studies the effect of various HLS optimization techniques on the total latency and hardware resource utilization on Xilinx Alveo U280 and Intel Arria 10GX 1150 high-performance FPGAs, using in both cases the commercial HLS tools of the producer. The channel model accuracy is preserved using double precision floating point arithmetic. This work analyzes in detail the effort to target the FPGA platforms using HLS tools, both in terms of common parallelization effort (shared by both FPGAs), and in terms of platform-specific effort, different for Xilinx and Intel FPGAs. Compared to the baseline general-purpose central processing unit (CPU) implementation, the achieved speedups are 65X and 95X using the Xilinx UltraScale+ and Intel Arria FPGA platform respectively, when using a Double Data Rate (DDR) memory interface. The FPGA-based designs also achieved ~3X better performance compared to a similar technology node NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 GPU, while consuming ~4X less energy. The FPGA implementation speedup improves up to 173X over the CPU baseline when using the Xilinx UltraRAM (URAM) and High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) resources, also achieving 6X lower latency and 12X lower energy consumption than the GPU implementation.

Buffer Placement and Sizing for High-Performance Dataflow Circuits

Commercial high-level synthesis tools typically produce statically scheduled circuits. Yet, effective C-to-circuit conversion of arbitrary software applications calls for dataflow circuits, as they can handle efficiently variable latencies (e.g., caches), unpredictable memory dependencies, and irregular control flow. Dataflow circuits exhibit an unconventional property: registers (usually referred to as “buffers”) can be placed anywhere in the circuit without changing its semantics, in strong contrast to what happens in traditional datapaths. Yet, although functionally irrelevant, this placement has a significant impact on the circuit’s timing and throughput. In this work, we show how to strategically place buffers into a dataflow circuit to optimize its performance. Our approach extracts a set of choice-free critical loops from arbitrary dataflow circuits and relies on the theory of marked graphs to optimize the buffer placement and sizing. Our performance optimization model supports important high-level synthesis features such as pipelined computational units, units with variable latency and throughput, and if-conversion. We demonstrate the performance benefits of our approach on a set of dataflow circuits obtained from imperative code.

Assisting High-Level Synthesis Improve SpMV Benchmark Through Dynamic Dependence Analysis

Recent advances in high-level synthesis (HLS) have enabled an automatic means of generating register-transfer level from high-level specifications without compromising performance. HLS provides substantial improvements to productivity and is a promising solution to designing future heterogeneous chips consisting of dozens of unique IP blocks (i.e., hardware accelerators). Despite their impressive capabilities, HLS tools today are commonly used to target a small subset of workloads, i.e., ones with inordinately regular control flow and memory access patterns. The challenges of achieving high-quality hardware for irregular workloads stems from HLS relying on static analysis. Static analysis is overly conservative when dealing with non-uniform memory access and imbalanced workloads, and identifying the most appropriate parallelizing strategy. In this brief, we propose the use of dynamic analysis to generate higher quality designs using commercial HLS tools. Our evaluations show that with dynamic dependence analysis, HLS designs achieve 3.3× performance improvement for the sparse matrix-vector multiply benchmark.

Data Reuse Buffer Synthesis Using the Polyhedral Model

Current high-level synthesis (HLS) tools for the automatic design of computing hardware perform excellently for the synthesis of computation kernels, but they often do not optimize memory bandwidth. As accessing memory is a bottleneck in many algorithms, the performance of the generated circuit could benefit substantially from memory access optimization. In this paper, we present a method and a tool to automate the optimization of memory accesses to array data in HLS by introducing local memory tailored perfectly to store only the data that are used repeatedly. Our method detects data reuse in the source code of the algorithm to be implemented in hardware, selects and parameterizes data reuse buffers, and generates a register transfer level design of the data buffers and a matching loop controller that coordinates reuse buffers and datapath operations. Throughout this paper, the polyhedral representation is used extensively as it proves to be well suited for calculations on loop nests and data accesses. As a consequence, this paper is limited to affine programs which can be represented in this model. Experiments show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art academic and commercial HLS tools.

Architecture and Synthesis for Area-Efficient Pipelining of Irregular Loop Nests

Modern high-level synthesis (HLS) tools commonly employ pipelining to achieve efficient loop acceleration by overlapping the execution of successive loop iterations. While existing HLS pipelining techniques obtain good performance with low complexity for regular loop nests, they provide inadequate support for effectively synthesizing irregular loop nests. For loop nests with dynamic-bound inner loops, current pipelining techniques require unrolling of the inner loops, which is either very expensive in resource or even inapplicable due to dynamic loop bounds. To address this major limitation, this paper proposes ElasticFlow, a novel architecture capable of dynamically distributing inner loops to an array of processing units (LPUs) in an area-efficient manner. The proposed LPUs can be either specialized to execute an individual inner loop or shared among multiple inner loops to balance the tradeoff between performance and area. A customized banked memory architecture is proposed to coordinate memory accesses among different LPUs to maximize memory bandwidth without significantly increasing memory footprint. We evaluate ElasticFlow using a variety of real-life applications and demonstrate significant performance improvements over a state-of-the-art commercial HLS tool for Xilinx FPGAs.

FPGA design space exploration for scientific HPC applications using a fast and accurate cost model based on roofline analysis

High-performance computing on heterogeneous platforms in general and those with FPGAs in particular presents a significant programming challenge. We contend that compiler technology has to evolve to automatically optimize applications by transforming a given original program. We are developing a novel methodology based on type transformations on a functional description of a given scientific kernel, for generating correct-by-construction design variants. An associated lightweight costing mechanism for evaluating these variants is a cornerstone of our methodology, and the focus of this paper. We discuss our use of the roofline model to work with our optimizing compiler to enable us to quickly derive accurate estimates of performance from the design’s representation in our custom intermediate language. We show results confirming the accuracy of our cost model by validating it on different scientific kernels. A case study is presented to demonstrate that a solution created from our optimizing framework outperforms commercial high-level synthesis tools both in terms of throughput and power efficiency.

Automatic generation of efficient accelerators for reconfigurable hardware

Acceleration in the form of customized datapaths offer large performance and energy improvements over general purpose processors. Reconfigurable fabrics such as FPGAs are gaining popularity for use in implementing application-specific accelerators, thereby increasing the importance of having good high-level FPGA design tools. However, current tools for targeting FPGAs offer inadequate support for high-level programming, resource estimation, and rapid and automatic design space exploration. We describe a design framework that addresses these challenges. We introduce a new representation of hardware using parameterized templates that captures locality and parallelism information at multiple levels of nesting. This representation is designed to be automatically generated from high-level languages based on parallel patterns. We describe a hybrid area estimation technique which uses template-level models and design-level artificial neural networks to account for effects from hardware place-and-route tools, including routing overheads, register and block RAM duplication, and LUT packing. Our runtime estimation accounts for off-chip memory accesses. We use our estimation capabilities to rapidly explore a large space of designs across tile sizes, parallelization factors, and optional coarse-grained pipelining, all at multiple loop levels. We show that estimates average 4.8% error for logic resources, 6.1% error for runtimes, and are 279 to 6533 times faster than a commercial high-level synthesis tool. We compare the best-performing designs to optimized CPU code running on a server-grade 6 core processor and show speedups of up to 16.7×.

Efficient Hardware Design of Iterative Stencil Loops

A large number of algorithms for multidimensional signals processing and scientific computation come in the form of iterative stencil loops (ISLs), whose data dependencies span across multiple iterations. Because of their complex inner structure, automatic hardware acceleration of such algorithms is traditionally considered as a difficult task. In this paper, we introduce an automatic design flow that identifies, in a wide family of bidimensional data processing algorithms, subportions that exhibit a kind of parallelism close to that of ISLs; these are mapped onto a space of highly optimized ad-hoc architectures, which is efficiently explored to identify the best implementations with respect to both area and throughput. Experimental results show that the proposed methodology generates circuits whose performance is comparable to that of manually optimized solutions, and orders of magnitude higher than those generated by commercial high-level synthesis tools.

Architecture and Application-Aware Management of Complexity of Mapping Multiplication to FPGA DSP Blocks in High Level Synthesis

Multiplication is a common operation in many applications and there exist various types of multiplication operations. Current high level synthesis (HLS) flows generally treat all multiplication operations equally and indistinguishable from each other leading to inefficient mapping to resources. This paper proposes algorithms for automatically identifying the different types of multiplication operations and investigates the ensemble of these different types of multiplication operations. This distinguishes it from previous works where mapping strategies for an individual type of multiplication operation have been investigated and the type of multiplication operation is assumed to be knowna priori. A new cost model, independent of device and synthesis tools, for establishing priority among different types of multiplication operations for mapping to on-chip DSP blocks is also proposed. This cost model is used by a proposed analysis and priority ordering based mapping strategy targeted at making efficient use of hard DSP blocks on FPGAs while maximizing the operating frequency of designs. Results show that the proposed methodology could result in designs which were at least 2× faster in performance than those generated by commercial HLS tool: Vivado-HLS.

Automatic synthesis of physical system differential equation models to a custom network of general processing elements on FPGAs

Fast execution of physical system models has various uses, such as simulating physical phenomena or real-time testing of medical equipment. Physical system models commonly consist of thousands of differential equations. Solving such equations using software on microprocessor devices may be slow. Several past efforts implement such models as parallel circuits on special computing devices called Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), demonstrating large speedups due to the excellent match between the massive fine-grained local communication parallelism common in physical models and the fine-grained parallel compute elements and local connectivity of FPGAs. However, past implementation efforts were mostly manual or ad hoc. We present the first method for automatically converting a set of ordinary differential equations into circuits on FPGAs. The method uses a general Processing Element (PE) that we developed, designed to quickly solve a set of ordinary differential equations while using few FPGA resources. The method instantiates a network of general PEs, partitions equations among the PEs to minimize communication, generates each PE's custom program, creates custom connections among PEs, and maintains synchronization of all PEs in the network. Our experiments show that the method generates a 400-PE network on a commercial FPGA that executes four different models on average 15x faster than a 3 GHz Intel processor, 30x faster than a commercial 4-core ARM, 14x faster than a commercial 6-core Texas Instruments digital signal processor, and 4.4x faster than an NVIDIA 336-core graphics processing unit. We also show that the FPGA-based approach is reasonably cost effective compared to using the other platforms. The method yields 2.1x faster circuits than a commercial high-level synthesis tool that uses the traditional method for converting behavior to circuits, while using 2x fewer lookup tables, 2x fewer hardcore multiplier (DSP) units, though 3.5x more block RAM due to being programmable. Furthermore, the method does not just generate a single fastest design, but generates a range of designs that trade off size and performance, by using different numbers of PEs.

LegUp

It is generally accepted that a custom hardware implementation of a set of computations will provide superior speed and energy efficiency relative to a software implementation. However, the cost and difficulty of hardware design is often prohibitive, and consequently, a software approach is used for most applications. In this article, we introduce a new high-level synthesis tool called LegUp that allows software techniques to be used for hardware design. LegUp accepts a standard C program as input and automatically compiles the program to a hybrid architecture containing an FPGA-based MIPS soft processor and custom hardware accelerators that communicate through a standard bus interface. In the hybrid processor/accelerator architecture, program segments that are unsuitable for hardware implementation can execute in software on the processor. LegUp can synthesize most of the C language to hardware, including fixed-sized multidimensional arrays, structs, global variables, and pointer arithmetic. Results show that the tool produces hardware solutions of comparable quality to a commercial high-level synthesis tool. We also give results demonstrating the ability of the tool to explore the hardware/software codesign space by varying the amount of a program that runs in software versus hardware. LegUp, along with a set of benchmark C programs, is open source and freely downloadable, providing a powerful platform that can be leveraged for new research on a wide range of high-level synthesis topics.

LOPASS: A Low-Power Architectural Synthesis System for FPGAs With Interconnect Estimation and Optimization

In this paper, we present a low-power architectural synthesis system (LOPASS) for field-programmable gate-array (FPGA) designs with interconnect power estimation and optimization. LOPASS includes three major components: 1) a flexible high-level power estimator for FPGAs considering the power consumption of various FPGA logic components and interconnects; 2) a simulated-annealing optimization engine that carries out resource selection and allocation, scheduling, functional unit binding, register binding, and interconnection estimation simultaneously to reduce power effectively; and 3) a <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">k</i> - <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">cofamily</i> -based register binding algorithm and an efficient port assignment algorithm that reduce interconnections in the data path through multiplexer optimization. The experimental results show that LOPASS produces promising results on latency optimization compared to an academic high-level synthesis tool <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">SPARK</i> . Compared to an early commercial high-level synthesis tool, namely, Synopsys <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Behavioral Compiler</i> , LOPASS is 61.6% better on power consumption and 10.6% better on clock period on average. Compared to a current commercial tool, namely, <i xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Impulse C</i> , LOPASS is 31.1% better on power reduction with an 11.8% penalty on clock period.

Generation of distributed logic-memory architectures through high-level synthesis

With the increasing cost of on-chip global communication, high-performance designs for data-intensive applications require architectures that distribute hardware resources (computing logic, memories, interconnect, etc.) throughout the chip, while restricting computations and communications to geographic proximities. In this paper, we present a methodology for high-level synthesis (HLS) of distributed logic-memory architectures, i.e., architectures that have logic and memory distributed across several partitions in a chip. Conventional HLS tools are capable of extracting parallelism from a behavior for architectures that assume a monolithic controller/datapath communicating with a memory or memory hierarchy. This paper provides techniques to extend the synthesis frontier to more general architectures that can extract both coarse and fine-grained parallelism from data accesses and computations in a synergistic manner. Our methodology selects many possible ways of organizing data and computations, carefully examines the tradeoffs (i.e., communication overheads, synchronization costs, area overheads) in choosing one solution over another, and utilizes conventional HLS techniques for intermediate steps. We have evaluated the proposed framework on several benchmarks by generating register-transfer level (RTL) implementations using an existing commercial HLS tool with and without our enhancements, and by subjecting the resulting RTL circuits to logic synthesis and layout. The results show that circuits designed as distributed logic-memory architectures using our framework achieve significant (up to 5.3/spl times/, average of 3.5/spl times/) performance improvements over well-optimized conventional designs with small area overheads (up to 19.3%, 15.1% on average). At the same time, the reduction in the energy-delay product is by an average of 5.9/spl times/ (up to 11.0/spl times/).