Optimizing Remote Accesses for Offloaded Kernels: Application to High-Level Synthesis for FPGA
Résumé
In the context of the high-level synthesis (HLS) of regular kernels offloaded to FPGA and communicating with an external DDR memory, we show how to automatically generate adequate communicating processes for optimizing the transfer of remote data. This requires a generalized form of communication coalescing where data can be transferred from the external memory even when this memory is not fully up-to-date. Experiments with Altera HLS tools demonstrate that this automatization, based on advanced polyhedral code analysis and code generation techniques, can be used to efficiently map C kernels to FPGA, by generating, entirely at C level, all the necessary glue (the communication processes), which is compiled with the same HLS tool as for the computation kernel.