Dataflow architectures are growing in popularity due to their potential to mitigate the challenges posed by the memory wall inherent to the Von Neumann architecture. At the same time, high-level synthesis (HLS) has demonstrated its efficacy as a design methodology for generating efficient dataflow architectures within a short development cycle. However, existing HLS tools rely on developers to explore the vast dataflow design space, ultimately leading to suboptimal designs. This phenomenon is especially concerning as the size of the HLS design grows. To tackle these challenges, we introduce HIDA1, a new scalable and hierarchical HLS framework that can systematically convert an algorithmic description into a dataflow implementation on hardware. We first propose a collection of efficient and versatile dataflow representations for modeling the hierarchical dataflow structure. Capitalizing on these representations, we develop an automated optimizer that decomposes the dataflow optimization problem into multiple levels based on the inherent dataflow hierarchy. Using FPGAs as an evaluation platform, working with a set of neural networks modeled in PyTorch, HIDA achieves up to 8.54× higher throughput compared to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) HLS optimization tool. Furthermore, despite being fully automated and able to handle various applications, HIDA achieves 1.29× higher throughput over the SOTA RTL-based neural network accelerators on an FPGA.

This paper proposes a High-Level Synthesis (HLS) framework for domain-specific computing. The framework contains three key components: 1) ScaleHLS, a multi-level HLS compilation flow. Aimed to address the lack of expressiveness and hardware-dedicated representation of traditional software-oriented compilers. ScaleHLS introduces a hierarchical intermediate representation (IR) for the progressive optimization of HLS designs defined in various high-level languages. ScaleHLS consists of three levels of optimizations, including graph, loop, and directive levels, to realize an efficient compilation pipeline and generate highly-optimized domain-specific accelerators. 2) AutoScaleDSE is an automated design space exploration (DSE) engine. Real-world HLS designs often come with large design spaces that are difficult for designers to explore. Meanwhile, the connections between different components of an HLS design further complicate the design spaces. In order to address the DSE problem, AutoScaleDSE proposes a random forest classifier and a graph-driven approach to improve the accuracy of estimating the intermediate DSE results while reducing the time and computational cost. With this new approach, AutoScaleDSE can evaluate thousands of HLS design points and find the Pareto-dominating design points within a couple of hours. 3) PyTransform is a flexible pattern-driven design customization flow. Existing HLS flows demand manual code rewriting or intrusive compiler customization to conduct domain-specific optimizations, leading to unscalable or inflexible compiler solutions. PyTransform proposes a Python-based flow that enables users to define custom matching and rewriting patterns at a high level of abstraction, being able to be incorporated into the DSL compilation flow in an automatic and scalable manner. In summary, ScaleHLS, AutoScaleDSE, and PyTransform aim to address the challenges present in the compilation, DSE, and customization of existing HLS flows, respectively. With the three key components, our newly proposed HLS framework can deliver a scalable and extensible solution for designing domain-specific languages to automate and speed up the process of designing domain-specific accelerators.

High-Level Synthesis (HLS) has enabled users to rapidly develop designs targeted for FPGAs from the behavioral description of the design. However, to synthesize an optimal design capable of taking better advantage of the target FPGA, a considerable amount of effort is needed to transform the initial behavioral description into a form that can capture the desired level of parallelism. Thus, a design space exploration (DSE) engine capable of optimizing large complex designs is needed to achieve this goal. We present a new DSE engine capable of considering code transformation, compiler directives (pragmas), and the compatibility of these optimizations. To accomplish this, we initially express the structure of the input code as a graph to guide the exploration process. To appropriately transform the code, we take advantage of ScaleHLS based on the multi-level compiler infrastructure (MLIR). Finally, we identify problems that limit the scalability of existing DSEs, which we name the “design space merging problem.” We address this issue by employing a Random Forest classifier that can successfully decrease the number of invalid design points without invoking the HLS compiler as a validation tool. We evaluated our DSE engine against the ScaleHLS DSE, outperforming it by a maximum of 59×. We additionally demonstrate the scalability of our design by applying our DSE to large-scale HLS designs, achieving a maximum speedup of 12× for the benchmarks in the MachSuite and Rodinia set.

This paper presents an enhanced version of a scalable HLS (High-Level Synthesis) framework named ScaleHLS, which can compile HLS C/C++ programs and PyTorch models to highly-efficient and synthesizable C++ designs. The original version of ScaleHLS achieved significant speedup on both C/C++ kernels and PyTorch models [14]. In this paper, we first highlight the key features of ScaleHLS on tackling the challenges present in the representation, optimization, and exploration of large-scale HLS designs. To further improve the scalability of ScaleHLS, we then propose an enhanced HLS transform and analysis library supported in both C++ and Python, and a new design space exploration algorithm to handle HLS designs with hierarchical structures more effectively. Comparing to the original ScaleHLS, our enhanced version improves the speedup by up to 60.9× on FPGAs. ScaleHLS is fully open-sourced at https://github.com/hanchenye/scalehls.