The growing demand for domain-specific accelerators in fields such as machine learning, graph analytics, and scientific computing has highlighted the need for productive and efficient hardware design methodologies. High-level synthesis (HLS) offers an attractive solution by generating hardware from high-level code, with loop pipelining as a cornerstone for maximizing throughput in regular computations. However, existing static and dynamic HLS approaches fail to achieve high pipeline utilization for irregular loop nests characterized by data-dependent bounds, unpredictable memory access patterns, and loop-carried dependencies.To address the pipeline underutilization in irregular loop, this work proposes a new barrier-free pipeline architecture with a cross-level scheduling strategy and the corresponding HLS compiler Selene, that automatically synthesizes the proposed architecture. Our approach introduces a fine-grained pipeline controller and an outer-loop iteration interleaving mechanism, enabling concurrent execution of multiple outer-loop iterations and efficient handling of data dependencies. Implemented within a commercial HLS flow, Vitis HLS, Selene delivers significant speedups of 4.74× and 5.46× over both standard static and dynamic HLS tools on a range of irregular workload benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness in overcoming challenges to efficient hardware generation for data-dependent applications.

Thanks to the computation ability on encrypted data, fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) is an attractive solution for privacy-preserving computation. Despite its advantages, FHE suffers from limited applicability in small programs because repeated FHE multiplications deplete the level of a ciphertext, which is finite. Bootstrapping reinitializes the level, thus allowing support for larger programs. However, its high computational overhead and the risk of level underflow require sophisticated bootstrapping placement, thereby increasing the programming burden. Although a recently proposed compiler automatizes the bootstrapping placement, its applicability is still limited due to lack of loop support.

Thanks to their scalable parallel processing capability, GPUs are promising computing resources for graph processing, in which identical operations are applied to a large number of edges and vertices. However, the sparsity and skewness of real-world graphs cause imbalanced workloads across GPU threads within the same warp, thus impeding efficient processing on the GPU. To mitigate this workload imbalance problem, existing works propose workload balancing hardware and software schemes. However, these solutions often suffer from additional memory overhead or increased computations and communication overheads during inter-warp and intra-warp synchronization. This work proposes a new hardware-software collaborative graph processing framework, SparseWeaver, that converts sparse operations in graph processing into dense operations using graph topology and makes the workloads balanced across GPU threads. Based on the analysis of common patterns in software schemes, we propose Weaver, a new lightweight GPU functional unit microarchitecture that fully leverages the benefits of the GPU architecture and exploits memory access locality. We prototype SparseWeaver on the open-source RISC-V Vortex GPU and demonstrate 2.36 times faster execution time compared to state-of-the-art schemes while incurring a low area overhead of 0.045% from increased dedicated logic registers.

Thanks to the computation ability on encrypted data and the efficient fixed-point execution, the RNS-CKKS fully homo-morphic encryption (FHE) scheme is a promising solution for privacy-preserving machine learning services. However, writing an efficient RNS-CKKS program is challenging due to its manual scale management requirement. Each cipher-text has a scale value with its maximum scale capacity. Since each RNS-CKKS multiplication increases the scale, programmers should properly rescale a ciphertext by reducing the scale and capacity together. Existing compilers reduce the programming burden by automatically analyzing and managing the scales of ciphertexts, but they either conservatively rescale ciphertexts and thus give up further optimization opportunities, or require time-consuming scale management space exploration.

Thanks to its massive parallel resources, a GPU is a promising platform for graph processing. However, the increasing size and skewed characteristics of the real-world graphs limit the performance improvement. Prior work proposes locality-enhancing graph transformations and load balancing techniques to improve performance, but they still suffer from excessive memory usage and inefficient parallel resource utilization because their graph representations are not fully tailored for a GPU. To efficiently utilize the GPU resource with less memory, this work proposes a new graph representation, called CR2. First, CR2 extracts community-aware subgraphs from a graph by clustering densely-connected vertices together. For the community-aware subgraphs, CR2 decomposes a vertex ID into a cluster ID and a local ID and represents each vertex only with the local ID, thus reducing memory usage. Second, CR2 additionally partitions the graph into multiple degree-ordered subgraphs in which all the vertices have the same regularized number of edges, thus making parallel workload balanced across GPU warps. This work evaluates CR2 with four commonly used graph algorithms and shows that CR2 achieves 1.53 times performance speedup while using 32.1% less memory on the geomean average compared to the state-of-the-art techniques.

Fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) offers a promising solution for privacy-preserving cloud computing by allowing cloud servers to compute on encrypted data without decryption. However, its applicability is limited by the programming burden of ciphertext management and considerable operational latency. Recently proposed FHE compilers automate ciphertext management, but they transform all data into ciphertexts without filtering private data, thus unnecessarily increasing FHE ciphertexts and the overall latency. This work introduces a new privacy-authority type, called privacy-set (PSet), that allows programmers to annotate authorized devices for each unit of private data. Moreover, this work proposes a new privacy authority-aware compiler that automatically transforms a PSet-annotated plain program into an FHE-enabled edge-cloud cooperative program with operation authority- and latency-aware partitioning. This work evaluates the PSet compiler with six machine learning and deep learning applications, and demonstrates that the PSet compiler performs 4.92 times faster than the existing FHE compilers that do not support edge-cloud partitioning.

Only with a right schedule and a right topology layout, a graph algorithm can be efficiently processed on GPUs. Existing GPU graph processing frameworks try to find an optimal schedule and topology layout for an algorithm via iterative search, but they fail to find the optimal configuration because their schedules and topology layouts are tightly coupled in their processing models. Moreover, their tightly coupled schedules and topology layouts make it difficult for developers to extend the tuning space. To easily enlarge the tuning space of GPU graph processing, this work proposes a new GPU graph processing abstraction scheme that fully decouples schedules, topology layouts, and algorithms from each other with abstraction interfaces. Moreover, this work proposes GRAssembler, a new GPU graph processing framework that efficiently integrates the decoupled schedule, topology layout, and algorithm without abstraction overhead. Thanks to the efficient decoupling and integration, GRAssembler increases the tuning space from 336 to 4,480 and achieves 30.4% higher performance on geomean average, compared to the state-of-the-art GPU graph processing framework.

Despite the benefit of Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) that supports encrypted computation, writing an efficient FHE application is challenging due to magnitude scale management. Each FHE operation increases scales of ciphertext and leaving the scales high harms performance of the following FHE operations. Thus, rescaling ciphertext is inevitable to optimize an FHE application, but since FHE requires programmers to match the rescaling levels of operands of each FHE operation, programmers should rescale ciphertext reflecting the entire FHE application. Although recently proposed FHE compilers reduce the programming burden by automatically manipulating ciphertext scales, they fail to fully optimize the FHE application because they greedily rescale the ciphertext without considering their performance impacts throughout the entire application. This work proposes HECATE, a new FHE compiler framework that optimizes scales of ciphertext reflecting their rescaling levels and performance impact. With a new type system that embeds the scale and rescaling level, and a new rescaling operation called downscale, HECATE makes various scale management plans, analyzes their expected performance, and finds the optimal rescaling points throughout the entire FHE application. This work implements HECATE on top of the MLIR framework with a Python frontend and shows that HECATE achieves 27% speedup over the state-of-the-art approach for various FHE applications.

In the embedded device market, custom hardware platforms such as an application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and a field programmable gate array (FPGA) are attractive thanks to their high performance and power efficiency. However, its huge design costs make it challenging for manufacturers to timely launch new devices. High-level synthesis (HLS) helps significantly reduce the design costs by automating the translation of service algorithms into hardware logics; however, current HLS compilers do not fit well to embedded devices as they fail to produce area-efficient solutions while supporting concurrent events from diverse peripherals such as sensors, actuators and network modules. This paper proposes a new thread-aware HLS compiler named Duro that produces area-efficient embedded devices. Duro shares commonly-invoked functions and operators across different callers and threads with a new thread-aware area cost model, and thus effectively reduces the logic size. Moreover, Duro supports a variety of device peripherals by automatically integrating peripheral controllers and interfaces as peripheral drivers. The experiment results of six embedded devices with ten peripherals demonstrate that Duro reduces the area and energy dissipation of embedded devices by 28.5% and 25.3% compared with the designs generated by the state-of-the-art HLS compiler. This work also implements FPGA prototypes of the six devices using Duro, and the measurement results show 65.3% energy saving over Raspberry Pi Zero with slightly better computation performance.

Serverless computing like Function-as-a-Service (FaaS) is attractive for IoT service providers, liberating the providers from server maintenance. Since a data processing function is executed on the cloud instead of a dedicated server in the FaaS platform, the service users send their private data in their IoT devices to the third-party cloud, taking privacy leakage risks. Homomorphic encryption (HE) can preserve the privacy by enabling encrypted data processing on the cloud, but using HE for every data item incurs large computation and communication overheads. This work proposes SelectiveCrypt, a compiler-assisted semantic-aware encryption scheme that applies different cryptographic primitives depending on the operations on each data item. SelectiveCrypt homomorphically encrypts data items if arithmetic operations are applied to the data, while SelectiveCrypt encrypts data items with a symmetric key if the data are stored in the cloud without any arithmetic operation. The SelectiveCrypt framework consists of a compiler and its runtime system. The SelectiveCrypt compiler statically analyzes the data processing, determines an appropriate cryptographic primitive for each data item, and automatically transforms arithmetic operations into the homomorphic computation. The SelectiveCrypt runtime encrypts and decrypts the data items according to the static analysis result. This work evaluates the prototype SelectiveCrypt framework with five benchmarks that reflect real-world IoT scenarios. The evaluation results show that the SelectiveCrypt framework successfully reduces response time and communication overhead by 1.59 times and 9.61 times, respectively, compared with a HE scheme.

With the technical advance of quantum computers that can solve intractable problems for conventional computers, many of the currently used public-key cryptosystems become vulnerable. Recently proposed post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is secure against both classical and quantum computers, but existing embedded systems such as smart card can not easily support the PQC algorithms due to their much larger key sizes and more complex arithmetics. To accelerate the PQC algorithms, embedded systems have to embed the PQC hardware blocks, which can lead to huge hardware design costs. Although High-Level Synthesis (HLS) helps significantly reduce the design costs, current HLS frameworks produce inefficient hardware design for the PQC algorithms in terms of area and performance. This work analyzes common features of the PQC algorithms and proposes a new pipeline-aware logic deduplication method in HLS. The proposed method shares commonly invoked logic across hardware design while considering load balancing in pipeline and resolving dynamic memory accesses. This work implements FPGA hardware design of seven PQC algorithms in the round 2 candidates from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) PQC standardization process. Compared to commercial HLS framework, the proposed method achieves an area-delay-product reduction by 34.5%.