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 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.

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.