Title
A run time interpretation approach for creating custom accelerators
Abstract
The world of software development has the notion of just-in-time compilation, run time binary translation, and language interpretation. These dynamic run time techniques support increased code portability and designer productivity. There are no such equivalences to increase the productivity or portability of creating new hardware components within Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). Instead, creating a new hardware component requires hardware design skills and the overhead of running through synthesis, place and route. If a change is made to even a single line of code, the synthesis, place and route steps must be repeated. In this paper we present a new approach that allows hardware accelerators to be built and run using compilation and run time interpretation. Our results show the approach can enable software programmers without any hardware skills to create hardware accelerators at productivity levels consistent with software development and compilation. The same accelerator can be compiled 100× faster than synthesis. Even though the approach is focused on productivity, our observed performance results are promising. Our initial application test cases show the same accelerator written by a software programmer and synthesized through Vivado HLS or written using our DSL and compiled within our approach achieves equivalent performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2015
10.1109/FPL.2015.7293996
Field Programmable Logic and Applications
Field
DocType
ISSN
Computer science,Portability testing,Real-time computing,Software,Software development,Programmer,Parallel computing,Field-programmable gate array,Place and route,Test case,Software portability,Operating system,Embedded system
Conference
1946-1488
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
6
0.62
6
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sen Ma1235.31
Zeyad Aklah2202.59
David L. Andrews326529.63