Stream Processor Generator for HPC to Embedded Applications on FPGA-based System Platform

Abstract

This paper presents a stream processor generator, called SPGen, for FPGA-based system-on-chip platforms. In our research project, we use an FPGA as a common platform for applications ranging from HPC to embedded/robotics computing. Pipelining in application-specific stream processors brings FPGAs power-efficient and high-performance computing. However, poor productivity in developing custom pipelines prevents the reconfigurable platform from being widely and easily used. SPGen aims at assisting developers to design and implement high-throughput stream processors by generating their HDL codes with our domain-specific high-level stream processing description, called SPD.With an example of fluid dynamics computation, we validate SPD for describing a real application and verify SPGen for synthesis with a pipelined data-flow graph. We also demonstrate that SPGen allows us to easily explore a design space for finding better implementation than a hand-designed one.