arXiv subjects

Karl F. A. Friebel

Publications and source records attributed to Karl F. A. Friebel.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Demonstrating a Future for MLIR-native DSL Compilers on a NumPy-like Example

Compilers for general-purpose languages have been shown to be at a disadvantage when it comes to specialized application domains as opposed to their Domain-Specific Language (DSL) counterparts. However, the field of DSL compilers features little consolidation in terms of compiler frameworks and adjacent software ecosystems. As a result, considerable work is duplicated, lost to maintenance issues, or remains undiscovered, and most DSLs are never considered "production-ready". One notable development is the introduction of the Multi-Level Intermediate Representation (MLIR), which promises a similar impact on DSL compilers as LLVM had on general-purpose tooling. In this work, we present a NumPy-like DSL made for offloading numeric tensor kernels that is entirely MLIR-native. In a first for open-source, it implements all frontend actions and semantic analyses directly within MLIR. Most notably, this is made possible by our new dialect-agnostic MLIR type checker, created for the future of DSLs in MLIR. We implement a simple, yet effective, parallel-first lowering scheme that connects our language to another MLIR dataflow dialect for seamless offloading. We show that our approach performs well in real-world use cases from the domain of weather modeling and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) in Fortran.

cs.PL↗

arXiv2024

CINM (Cinnamon): A Compilation Infrastructure for Heterogeneous Compute In-Memory and Compute Near-Memory Paradigms

The rise of data-intensive applications exposed the limitations of conventional processor-centric von-Neumann architectures that struggle to meet the off-chip memory bandwidth demand. Therefore, recent innovations in computer architecture advocate compute-in-memory (CIM) and compute-near-memory (CNM), non-von- Neumann paradigms achieving orders-of-magnitude improvements in performance and energy consumption. Despite significant technological breakthroughs in the last few years, the programmability of these systems is still a serious challenge. Their programming models are too low-level and specific to particular system implementations. Since such future architectures are predicted to be highly heterogenous, developing novel compiler abstractions and frameworks become necessary. To this end, we present CINM (Cinnamon), a first end-to-end compilation flow that leverages the hierarchal abstractions to generalize over different CIM and CNM devices and enable device-agnostic and device-aware optimizations. Cinnamon progressively lowers input programs and performs optimizations at each level in the lowering pipeline. To show its efficacy, we evaluate CINM on a set of benchmarks for the well-known UPMEM CNM system and the memristors-based CIM accelerators. We show that Cinnamon, supporting multiple hardware targets, generates high-performance code comparable to or better than state-of-the-art implementations.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

A System Development Kit for Big Data Applications on FPGA-based Clusters: The EVEREST Approach

Modern big data workflows are characterized by computationally intensive kernels. The simulated results are often combined with knowledge extracted from AI models to ultimately support decision-making. These energy-hungry workflows are increasingly executed in data centers with energy-efficient hardware accelerators since FPGAs are well-suited for this task due to their inherent parallelism. We present the H2020 project EVEREST, which has developed a system development kit (SDK) to simplify the creation of FPGA-accelerated kernels and manage the execution at runtime through a virtualization environment. This paper describes the main components of the EVEREST SDK and the benefits that can be achieved in our use cases.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2022

Automatic Creation of High-Bandwidth Memory Architectures from Domain-Specific Languages: The Case of Computational Fluid Dynamics

Numerical simulations can help solve complex problems. Most of these algorithms are massively parallel and thus good candidates for FPGA acceleration thanks to spatial parallelism. Modern FPGA devices can leverage high-bandwidth memory technologies, but when applications are memory-bound designers must craft advanced communication and memory architectures for efficient data movement and on-chip storage. This development process requires hardware design skills that are uncommon in domain-specific experts. In this paper, we propose an automated tool flow from a domain-specific language (DSL) for tensor expressions to generate massively-parallel accelerators on HBM-equipped FPGAs. Designers can use this flow to integrate and evaluate various compiler or hardware optimizations. We use computational fluid dynamics (CFD) as a paradigmatic example. Our flow starts from the high-level specification of tensor operations and combines an MLIR-based compiler with an in-house hardware generation flow to generate systems with parallel accelerators and a specialized memory architecture that moves data efficiently, aiming at fully exploiting the available CPU-FPGA bandwidth. We simulated applications with millions of elements, achieving up to 103 GFLOPS with one compute unit and custom precision when targeting a Xilinx Alveo U280. Our FPGA implementation is up to 25x more energy-efficient than expert-crafted Intel CPU implementations.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2021

From Domain-Specific Languages to Memory-Optimized Accelerators for Fluid Dynamics

Many applications are increasingly requiring numerical simulations for solving complex problems. Most of these numerical algorithms are massively parallel and often implemented on parallel high-performance computers. However, classic CPU-based platforms suffers due to the demand for higher resolutions and the exponential growth of data. FPGAs offer a powerful and flexible alternative that can host accelerators to complement such platforms. Developing such application-specific accelerators is still challenging because it is hard to provide efficient code for hardware synthesis. In this paper, we study the challenges of porting a numerical simulation kernel onto FPGA. We propose an automated tool flow from a domain-specific language (DSL) to generate accelerators for computational fluid dynamics on FPGA. Our DSL-based flow simplifies the exploration of parameters and constraints such as on-chip memory usage. We also propose a decoupled optimization of memory and logic resources, which allows us to better use the limited FPGA resources. In our preliminary evaluation, this enabled doubling the number of parallel kernels, increasing the accelerator speedup versus ARM execution from 7 to 12 times.

cs.DC↗