Fast Code Exploration for Pipeline Processing in FPGA Accelerators

Abstract

The increasing demand for energy efficient computing has endorsed the usage of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays to create hardware accelerators for large and complex codes. However, implementing such accelerators involve two complex decisions. The first one lies in deciding which code snippet is the best to create an accelerator, and the second one lies in how to implement the accelerator. When considering both decisions concomitantly, the problem becomes more complicated since the code snippet implementation affects the code snippet choice, creating a combined design space to be explored. As such, a fast design space exploration for the accelerators implementation is crucial to allow the exploration of different code snippets. However, such design space exploration suffers from several time-consuming tasks during the compilation and evaluation steps, making it not a viable option to the snippets exploration. In this work, we focus on the efficient implementation of pipelined hardware accelerators and present our contributions on speeding up the pipelines creation and their design space exploration. Towards loop pipelining, the proposed approaches achieve up to 100× speed-up when compared to the state-uf-the-art methods, leading to 164 hours saving in a full design space exploration with less than 1% impact in the final results quality. Towards design space exploration, the proposed methods achieve up to 9.5× speed-up, keeping less than 1% impact in the results quality.