Abstract Kiwi Synthesis of FPGA Circuits from Parallel Programs.pdf

Kiwi: Synthesis of FPGA Circuits from Parallel Programs David Greaves Satnam Singh Computer Laboratory Microsoft Research Cambridge University of Cambridge Cambridge CB3 0FB Cambridge CB3 0FD United Kingdom United Kingdom satnams@ David.Greaves@cl.cam.ac.uk Abstract ware engineer will involve designing programs for pro- cessors that contain not only regular CPUs as we know We describe the Kiwi parallel programming library and them today but also more specialized processing units e.g. its associated synthesis system which is used to transform the evolution of today’s GPUs as general purpose com- C# parallel programs into circuits for realization on FP- puting engines and a version of today’s FPGAs as a Lego- GAs. The Kiwi system is targeted at making reconfig- like 2D parallel computing resource. This presents a valu- urable computing technology accessible to software en- able opportunity for efficiently expressing many compute gineers that are willing to express their computations as intensive calculations using more parallel computing re- parallel programs. Although there has been much work sources. However, heterogeneous systems also pose a on compiling sequential C-like programs to hardware by huge programming challenge because, up to now, differ- automatically ‘discovering’ parallelism, we work by ex- ent kinds of compute resources have been modeled and ploiting the parallel architecture communicated by the de- programmed in very different ways. Successful heteroge- signer through the choice