Abstract:
We consider speeding up general-purpose applications with hardware accelerators. Traditionally hardware accelerators are tediously hand-crafted to achieve top performance...Show MoreMetadata
Abstract:
We consider speeding up general-purpose applications with hardware accelerators. Traditionally hardware accelerators are tediously hand-crafted to achieve top performance ASC (A Stream Complier) simplifies exploration of hardware accelerators by transforming the hardware design task into a software design process using only 'gcc' and 'make' to obtain a hardware netlist. ASC enables programmers to customize hardware accelarators at three levels of abstraction: the architecture level, the functional block level, and the bit level. All three customizations are based on one uniform representation: a single C++ program with custom types and operators for each level of abstraction. This representation allows ASC users to express and reason about the design space, extract parallelism at each level and quickly evaluate different design choices. In addition, since the user has full control over each gate-level resource in the entire design. ASC accelerator performance can always be equal to or better than hand-crafted designs, usually with much less effort. We present several ASC bench marks, including wavelet compression and Kasumi encryption.
Published in: Proceedings. 2003 IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology (FPT) (IEEE Cat. No.03EX798)
Date of Conference: 17-17 December 2003
Date Added to IEEE Xplore: 22 March 2004
Print ISBN:0-7803-8320-6