Imperial College London > Talks@ee.imperial > CAS Talks > Predictable Accelerator Design with Time-Sensitive Affine Types

Predictable Accelerator Design with Time-Sensitive Affine Types

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  • UserRachit Nigam (Cornell)
  • ClockMonday 08 June 2020, 16:00-17:00
  • HouseTeams.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact George A Constantinides.

Reconfigurable architectures can provide remarkable speedups for most application domains. Unfortunately, programming them requires deep knowledge of hardware design. In this talk, we’ll try to answer two questions: (1) what hoops does a software engineer have to jump through to design a hardware accelerator?, and (2) how can we make this task easier? We’ll specifically look at high-level synthesis (HLS), a catch-all term for compilers that can transform programs written in software languages like C++ into hardware designs. While HLS has the potential to open up hardware design to software engineers, it suffers from predictability challenges. Specifically, small changes in source programs can result in wild variances in performance and resource usage of the hardware design. We’ll talk about Dahlia (capra.cs.cornell.edu/dahlia), a language and a type system that can statically reject unpredictable HLS designs. Dahlia’s reasoning can be used to dramatically shrink the design space of an HLS program while accepting Pareto optimal designs. We’ll end the talk by going over Calyx, a new intermediary language (IL) for compiling domain specific languages into hardware accelerators.

Bio: Rachit Nigam (rachitnigam.com) is a second year student at Cornell University working with Adrian Sampson on high-level programming models for hardware accelerator design. Before being violently thrust into the world of computer architecture, Rachit worked on programming languages and built many compilers for JavaScript. He can be (virtually) found on Twitter (twitter.com/notypes) where he harasses his advisor and mildly annoys tenured people.

This talk is part of the CAS Talks series.

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