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Parallelising Control Flow in Dynamic-scheduling High-level Synthesis

delete2023-09-01
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OA
AI
J
Jianyi Cheng *
L
Lana Josipović
J
John Wickerson
G
George A. Constantinides
DOI:10.1145/3599973delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Recently, there is a trend to use high-level synthesis (HLS) tools to generate dynamically scheduled hardware. The generated hardware is made up of components connected using handshake signals. These handshake signals schedule the components at runtimewhen inputs become available. Such approaches promise superior performance on irregular source programs, such as those whose control flow depends on input data. This is at the cost of additional area. Current dynamic scheduling techniques are well able to exploit parallelism among instructions within each basic block (BB) of the source program, but parallelism between BBs is underexplored, due to the complexity in runtime control flows andmemory dependencies. Existing tools allowsome of the operations of different BBs to overlap, but to simplify the analysis required at compile time they require the BBs to start in strict program order, thus limiting the achievable parallelism and overall performance. We formulate a general dependency model suitable for comparing the ability of different dynamic scheduling approaches to extract maximal parallelism at runtime. Using this model, we explore a variety of mechanisms for runtime scheduling, incorporating and generalising existing approaches. In particular, we precisely identify the restrictions in existing scheduling implementation and define possible optimisation solutions. We identify two particularly promising examples where the compile-time overhead is small and the area overhead is minimal and yet we are able to significantly speed up execution time: (1) parallelising consecutive independent loops; and (2) parallelising independent inner-loop instances in a nested loop as individual threads. Using benchmark sets from related works, we compare our proposed toolflow against a state-of-the-art dynamic-scheduling HLS tool called Dynamatic. Our results show that, on average, our toolflow yields a 4x speedup from (1) and a 2.9x speedup from (2), with a negligible area overhead. This increases to a 14.3x average speedup when combining (1) and (2).
Keywords:
FPGA
high-level synthesis
dynamic scheduling
static analysis

Journal

ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems cover
ACM Transactions on Reconfigurable Technology and Systems
IF:
2.8
Papers:
597
Citations:
810

Organization

S
swiss federal institutes of technology domain
Scholars:
9.0W
Papers: 8.0W
Citations: 163
I
Imperial College London
Scholars:
8.3W
Papers: 7.3W
Citations: 11.1W