An Improved Intermediate Representation for Datapath Generation

摘要

Traditionally, computer performance is increased by using faster or additional processors. In contrast to this approach, adaptive computers accelerate applications by partially executing operations on reconfigurable hardware. To make these machines actually accessible to software programmers, powerful automatic compile flows are required. This paper motivates a new intermediate representation aimed at compiling from C source code to hybrid hardware/software executables for adaptive computers. Control and data flow are handled in a unified manner which simplifies optimizations and also improves the actual generation of hardware data paths. Furthermore, dedicated constructs are available to express speculative execution characteristics.