HGum: Messaging Framework for Hardware Accelerators

Abstract

Software messaging frameworks help avoid errors and reduce engineering efforts in building distributed systems by (1) providing an interface definition language (IDL) to specify precisely the structure of the message (i.e., the message schema), and (2) automatically generating the serialization and deserialization functions that transform user data structures into binary data for sending across the network and vice versa. Similarly, a hardware-accelerated system, which consists of host software and multiple FPGAs, could also benefit from a messaging framework to handle messages both between software and FPGA and also between different FPGAs. The key challenge for a hardware messaging framework is that it must be able to support large messages with complex schema while meeting critical constraints such as clock frequency, area, and throughput. In this paper, we present HGum, a messaging framework for hardware accelerators that meets all the above requirements. HGum is able to generate high-performance and low-cost hardware logic by employing a novel design that algorithmically parses the message schema to perform serialization and deserialization. Our evaluation of HGum shows that it not only significantly reduces engineering efforts but also generates hardware with comparable quality to manual implementation.