Scheduling and partitioning ANSI-C programs onto multi-FPGA CCM architectures

Abstract

The increasing size and speed of modern FPGAs allow complex computations, on the order of an average sized program, to be performed in a small collection of processing elements. It is well documented that the execution of large sections of a program within the "virtual hardware" offered by an attached FPGA processor can provide substantial speedup over the ordinary execution within a sequential, general-purpose processor. Unfortunately, the development tools currently available for FPGAs do not allow for easily configuring multi-FPGA custom computing machines. Configuration of an FPGA architecture requires scheduling: the mapping of computations onto existing functional units. To take advantage of all available logic, computations may span processing elements, calling for partitioning of a subroutine between one or more FPGAs. In this paper, an architecture-independent design tool is presented for translating programs written in C to a dataflow representation and then efficiently scheduling and partitioning the resulting graphs onto multi-FPGA computing platforms.