Unlocking Performance-Programmability by Penetrating the Intel FPGA OpenCL Toolflow

摘要

Improved support for OpenCL has been an important step towards the mainstream adoption of FPGAs as compute resources. Current research has shown, however, that programmability derived from use of OpenCL typically comes at a significant expense of performance, with the latter falling below that of hand-coded HDL, GPU, and even CPU designs. This can primarily be attributed to 1) constrained deployment opportunities, 2) high testing time-frames, and 3) limitations of the Board Support Package (BSP). We address these challenges by penetrating the toolflow and utilizing OpenCL-generated HDL (OpenCL-HDL), which is created as an initial step during the full compilation. OpenCL-HDL can be used as an intermediate stage in the design process to get better resource/latency estimates and perform RTL simulations. It can also be carved out and used as a building block for an existing HDL system. In this work, we present the process of generating, isolating, and re-interfacing OpenCL-HDL. We first propose a kernel template which reliably exploits parallelism opportunities and ensures all compute pipelines are implemented as a single HDL module. We then outline the process of identifying this module from the thousands of lines of compiler generated code. Finally, we categorize the different types of interfaces and present methods for connecting/bypassing them in order to support integration into an existing HDL shell. We evaluate our approach using a number of benchmarks from the Rodinia suite and Molecular Dynamics simulations. Our OpenCL-HDL implementations of all benchmarks show an average of 37x, 4.8x, and 3.5x speedup over existing FPGA/OpenCL, GPU, and FPGA/Verilog designs, respectively. We demonstrate that OpenCL-HDL is able to deliver hand-coded HDL-like performance with significantly less development effort and with competitive resource overhead.