Automated Toolchain for Enhanced Productivity in Reconfigurable Multi-accelerator Systems

Abstract

Ease-of-use and faster implementation times are key challenges that the community has to face to extend the use of FPGAs to non-hardware experts. In this paper, these challenges are tackled by integrating ARTICo³ and IMPRESS tools to provide the users with a transparent way to build reconfigurable multi-accelerator systems. ARTICo³ is an integrated framework that provides an automated toolchain to generate a hardware-based processing architecture to transparently manage custom-made accelerators at runtime. IMPRESS is a reconfiguration tool for building highly-flexible reconfigurable systems. The integration of both tools results in an efficient reconfigurable design flow that decouples the implementation of reconfigurable accelerators from the implementation of an ARTICo³ static architecture that transparently distributes data to the accelerators. This static architecture is generated only once and reused in consecutive kernel implementations. This way, the user only needs to design the accelerators that are automatically implemented using interfaces compatible with the static architecture. From the user point of view, the reconfigurable fabric is a set of slots where accelerators can be transparently offloaded to decrease the workload on the processor. The integration of ARTICo³ and IMPRESS also allows building relocatable accelerators, thus reducing the overall memory footprint required for the partial bitstreams. Moreover, model-based design of accelerators using Simulink has also been included as an additional option for users with no hardware background to further simplify the use of reconfigurable systems. Experimental results show that the implementation time is improved by up to 2.96$\times$ for a 4-slot reconfigurable system implementation with a memory footprint reduction of 4.54$\times$.