Title
Lattice-Traversing Design Space Exploration for High Level Synthesis
Abstract
This paper describes a design space exploration methodology for High Level Synthesis (HLS) frameworks. Inputs of HLS tools are a description (usually in C/C++) of the functionality of an intended hardware, and a set of optimisation directives that specify its implementation, hence allowing the generation of many design variants with widely varying performance and required resources. The relationship between directives and performance/cost is nonetheless not straightforward, and highly influenced by application-specific characteristics. A major challenge facing designers is then to define effective values for the directives while avoiding time-consuming - and often infeasible - exhaustive explorations. We herein address it by proposing a novel HLS exploration approach which employs a lattice representation of the design space, and a methodology for its navigation. We base our strategy on the observation that Pareto-implementations share a low variance among their configurations. We therefore guide the selection of HLS directives minimising the variance of new candidate solutions, with respect to the best performing ones that have already been visited. By only requiring local searches in the lattice space, our methodology gracefully scales to complex designs. It results in close approximations of the real Pareto frontier, while requiring a lower workload and fewer synthesis runs with respect to existing approaches.
Year
DOI
Venue
2018
10.1109/ICCD.2018.00040
2018 IEEE 36th International Conference on Computer Design (ICCD)
Keywords
Field
DocType
High Level Synthesis,Principal Component Analisys,Design Space Exploration
Design space,Lattice (order),Computer science,Workload,High-level synthesis,Parallel computing,Design space exploration,Computer engineering,Pareto principle,Traverse
Conference
ISSN
ISBN
Citations 
1063-6404
978-1-5386-8478-8
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
18
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lorenzo Ferretti1123.03
Giovanni Ansaloni29815.78
Laura Pozzi31139.33