Automatic Generation of Stream Descriptors for Streaming Architectures

Abstract

We describe a novel approach for automatically generating streaming architectures from software programs. While existing systems require user-defined stream models, our method automatically identifies producer-consumer streaming relationships and translates them into streaming architectures. Data streams between producer-consumer kernels are represented using a combination of stream descriptors and CFGs, which are categorized into four stream types. A bridge module is generated based on the stream type in the streaming architecture to facilitate data streaming between each producer-consumer pair. Several optimizations are also developed to improve throughput and parallelism. We demonstrate our results on a FPGA based platform. The automatically generated streaming architectures show 1.5-3x speedups over the non-streaming designs by employing spatial and temporal data independence to increase parallelism.