C to FPGA Compilation and Domain-Specific Computing

Опубликовано 6 сентября 2016, 17:24

In the first part of my talk, I shall present a platform-based compilation and synthesis system, named xPilot, developed at UCLA. The xPilot provides advanced behavioral synthesis capability for compiling C, C++ , or SystemC applications to high quality RTL code optimized for FPGA platforms for logic, interconnects, and memory optimization with flexibile performance and area trade-off. It includes a number of algorithmic innovations, such as scheduling based on the system of difference constraints, resource binding for distributed memory architectures, simultaneous register and functional unit binding, etc. The xPilot system has been licensed by AutoESL Design Technologies, Inc. for commercialization. The AutoPilot tool from AutoESL, derived from xPilot, has been successfully used for a number of FPGA designs. One application of using such C-to-FGPA compilation systems as xPilot or AutoPilot is to enable domain-specific computing using FPGAs as customized computing engines for accelerating a wide range of applications. The recent developments by AMD to open up its HyperTransport bus and Intel to open up its Front-side Bus lead to new high-performance computing platforms with high-bandwidth communication between CPUs and FPGAs, which make it possible to develop high-performance, power-efficient domain-specific computing platforms. In the second part of my talk, I shall share our experience in applying FPGA-based domain-specific computing for a number of computation-intensive applications in many domains, such as multimedia applications, financial engineering, and computer-aided designs. We have achieved very engaging initial results, including over 150X improvement in power-performance efficiency.