arXiv subjects

Michael Lo

Publications and source records attributed to Michael Lo.

2 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Holistic Optimization Framework for FPGA Accelerators

Customized accelerators have revolutionized modern computing by delivering substantial gains in energy efficiency and performance through hardware specialization. Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) play a crucial role in this paradigm, offering unparalleled flexibility and high-performance potential. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) and source-to-source compilers have simplified FPGA development by translating high-level programming languages into hardware descriptions enriched with directives. However, achieving high Quality of Results (QoR) remains a significant challenge, requiring intricate code transformations, strategic directive placement, and optimized data communication. This paper presents Prometheus, a holistic optimization framework that integrates key optimizations -- including task fusion, tiling, loop permutation, computation-communication overlap, and concurrent task execution -- into a unified design space. By leveraging Non-Linear Programming (NLP) methodologies, Prometheus explores the optimization space under strict resource constraints, enabling automatic bitstream generation. Unlike existing frameworks, Prometheus considers interdependent transformations and dynamically balances computation and memory access. We evaluate Prometheus across multiple benchmarks, demonstrating its ability to maximize parallelism, minimize execution stalls, and optimize data movement. The results showcase its superior performance compared to state-of-the-art FPGA optimization frameworks, highlighting its effectiveness in delivering high QoR while reducing manual tuning efforts.

cs.AR↗

arXiv2024

RapidStream IR: Infrastructure for FPGA High-Level Physical Synthesis

The increasing complexity of large-scale FPGA accelerators poses significant challenges in achieving high performance while maintaining design productivity. High-level synthesis (HLS) has been adopted as a solution, but the mismatch between the high-level description and the physical layout often leads to suboptimal operating frequency. Although existing proposals for high-level physical synthesis, which use coarse-grained design partitioning, floorplanning, and pipelining to improve frequency, have gained traction, they lack a framework enabling (1) pipelining of real-world designs at arbitrary hierarchical levels, (2) integration of HLS blocks, vendor IPs, and handcrafted RTL designs, (3) portability to emerging new target FPGA devices, and (4) extensibility for the easy implementation of new design optimization tools. We present RapidStream IR, a practical high-level physical synthesis (HLPS) infrastructure for representing the composition of complex FPGA designs and exploring physical optimizations. Our approach introduces a flexible intermediate representation (IR) that captures interconnection protocols at arbitrary hierarchical levels, coarse-grained pipelining, and spatial information, enabling the creation of reusable passes for design frequency optimizations. RapidStream IR improves the frequency of a broad set of mixed-source designs by 7% to 62%, including large language models and genomics accelerators, and is portable to user-customizable new FPGA platforms. We further demonstrate its extensibility through case studies, showcasing the ability to facilitate future research.

cs.AR↗