Section: Research Program

Compilers, code optimization and high-level synthesis for FPGA

Christophe Alias and Laure Gonnord asked to join the ROMA team temporarily, starting from September 2015. This was accepted by the team and by Inria. The text below describes their research domain. The results that they have achieved in 2016 are included in this report.

The advent of parallelism in supercomputers, in embedded systems (smartphones, plane controllers), and in more classical end-user computers increases the need for high-level code optimization and improved compilers. Being able to deal with the complexity of the upcoming software and hardware while keeping energy consumption at a reasonnable level is one of the main challenges cited in the Hipeac Roadmap which among others cites the two major issues :

• Enhance the efficiency of the design of embedded systems, and especially the design of optimized specialized hardware.

• Invent techniques to “expose data movement in applications and optimize them at runtime and compile time and to investigate communication-optimized algorithms”.

In particular, the rise of embedded systems and high performance computers in the last decade has generated new problems in code optimization, with strong consequences on the research area. The main challenge is to take advantage of the characteristics of the specific hardware (generic hardware, or hardware accelerators). The long-term objective is to provide solutions for the end-user developers to use at their best the huge opportunities of these emerging platforms.

Compiler algorithms for irregular applications

In the last decades, several frameworks has emerged to design efficient compiler algorithms. The efficiency of all the optimizations performed in compilers strongly relies on performant static analyses and intermediate representations. Among these representations, the polyhedral model [75] focus on regular programs, whose execution trace is predictable statically. The program and the data accessed are represented with a single mathematical object endowed with powerful algorithmic techniques for reasoning about it. Unfortunately, most of the algorithms used in scientific computing do not fit totally in this category.

We plan to explore the extensions of these techniques to handle irregular programs with while loops and complex data structures (such as trees, and lists). This raises many issues. We cannot represent finitely all the possible executions traces. Which approximation/representation to choose? Then, how to adapt existing techniques on approximated traces while preserving the correctness? To address these issues, we plan to incorporate new ideas coming from the abstract interpretation community: control flow, approximations, and also shape analysis; and from the termination community: rewriting is one of the major techniques that are able to handle complex data structures and also recursive programs.

High-level synthesis for FPGA

Energy consumption bounds the performance of supercomputers since the end of Dennard scaling. Hence, reducing the electrical energy spent in a computation is the major challenge raised by Exaflop computing. Novel hardware, software, compilers and operating systems must be designed to increase the energy efficiency (in flops/watt) of data manipulation and computation itself. In the last decade, many specialized hardware accelerators (Xeon Phi, GPGPU) has emerged to overcome the limitations of mainstream processors, by trading the genericity for energy efficiency. However, the best supercomputers can only reach 8 Gflops/watt [61], which is far less than the 50 Gflops/watt required by an Exaflop supercomputer. An extreme solution would be to trade all the genericity by using specialized circuits. However such circuits (application specific integrated circuits, ASIC) are usually too expensive for the HPC market and lacks of flexibility. Once printed, an ASIC cannot be modified. Any algorithm update (or bug fix) would be impossible, which clearly not realistic.

Recently, reconfigurable circuits (Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGA) has appeared as a credible alternative for Exaflop computing. Major companies (including Intel, Google, Facebook and Microsoft) show a growing interest to FPGA and promising results has been obtained. For instance, in 2015, Microsoft reaches 40 Gflop/watts on a data-center deep learning algorithm mapped on Intel/Altera Arria 10 FPGAs. We believe that FPGA will become the new building block for HPC and Big Data systems. Unfortunately, programming an FPGA is still a big challenge: the application must be defined at circuit level and use properly the logic cells. Hence, there is a strong need for a compiler technology able to map complex applications specified in a high-level language. This compiler technology is usually refered as high-level synthesis (HLS).

We plan to investigate how to extend the models and the algorithms developed by the HPC community to map automatically a complex application to an FPGA. This raises many issues. How to schedule/allocate the computations and the data on the FPGA in order to reduce the data transfers while keeping a high throughput? How to use optimally the resources of the FPGA while keeping a low critical path? To address these issues, we plan to develop novel execution models based on process networks and to extend/cross-fertilize the algorithms developed in both HPC and high-level synthesis communities. The purpose of the XtremLogic start-up company, co-founded by Christophe Alias and Alexandru Plesco is to transfer the results of this research to an industrial level compiler.