Compiling irregular applications for reconfigurable systems. (1st January 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Halstead, Robert J.; Villarreal, Jason; Najjar, Walid A.
• Is Part Of: International journal of high performance computing and networking. Volume 7:Number 4(2014)
• Page Start: 258
• Page End: 268
• Publication Date: 2014-01-01
• Subjects: irregular memory -- custom hardware accelerated threads -- CHAT -- compilers -- field programmable gate array -- FPGA -- C to VHDL -- irregular applications -- reconfigurable systems; High performance computing -- Periodicals; Computer networks -- Periodicals; High performance computing; Periodicals; 004.05
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1740-0562

Abstract

Algorithms that exhibit irregular memory access patterns are known to show poor performance on multiprocessor architectures, particularly when memory access latency is variable. Many common data structures, including graphs, trees, and linked-lists, exhibit these irregular memory access patterns. While FPGA-based code accelerators have been successful on applications with regular memory access patterns, they have not been further explored for irregular memory access patterns. Multithreading has been shown to be an effective technique in masking long latencies. We describe the compiler generation of concurrent hardware threads for FPGAs with the objective of masking the memory latency caused by irregular memory access patterns. The CHAT compiler extends the ROCCC toolset to generate customised state information for each dynamically generated thread. Initial results show a speed-up of 50x.