Efficient memory arbitration in high-level synthesis from multi-threaded code

Jianyi Cheng*, Shane T. Fleming, Yu Ting Chen, Jason Anderson, John Wickerson, George A. Constantinides

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract / Description of output

High-level synthesis (HLS) is an increasingly popular method for generating hardware from a description written in a software language like C/C++. Traditionally, HLS tools have operated on sequential code, however in recent years there has been a drive to synthesise multi-threaded code. In this context, a major challenge facing HLS tools is how to automatically partition memory among parallel threads to fully exploit the bandwidth available on an FPGA device and minimise memory contention. Existing partitioning approaches require inefficient arbitration circuitry to serialise accesses to each bank because they make conservative assumptions about which threads might access which memory banks. In this article, we design a static analysis that can prove certain memory banks are only accessed by certain threads, and use this analysis to simplify or even remove the arbiters while preserving correctness. We show how this analysis can be implemented using the Microsoft Boogie verifier on top of satisfiability modulo theories (SMT) solver, and propose a tool named EASY using automatic formal verification. Our work supports arbitrary input code with any irregular memory access patterns and indirect array addressing forms. We implement our approach in LLVM and integrate it into the LegUp HLS tool. For a set of typical application benchmarks our results have shown that EASY can achieve 0.13× (avg. 0.43) of area and 1.64 (avg. 1.28) of performance compared to the baseline, with little additional compilation time relative to the long time in hardware synthesis.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)933-946
Number of pages14
JournalIEEE Transactions on Computers
Volume71
Issue number4
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 17 Mar 2021

Keywords / Materials (for Non-textual outputs)

  • formal methods
  • FPGA
  • high-level synthesis
  • HLS
  • multi-threaded code

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