Design and Preliminary Evaluation of OpenACC Compiler for FPGA with OpenCL and Stream Processing DSL

Abstract

FPGA has emerged as one of the attractive computing devices in the post-Moore era because of its power efficiency and reconfigurability, even for future high-performance computing. We have designed an OpenACC compiler for FPGA to generate the kernel code by using stream processing Domain Specific Language (DSL) called SPGen, with OpenCL. Although, recently, the programming for FPGA has been improved dramatically by High-Level Synthesis (HLS) frameworks such as OpenCL and HLS C, yet it is still too difficult for HPC application developers, and the directive-based programming models such as OpenACC should be supported even for FPGA. OpenCL can be used as a portable intermediate code for OpenACC for FPGA. However, the generation of hardware from OpenCL is not easy to understand and therefore requires expert knowledge. SPGen is a DSL framework for generating stream processing HDL modules from the description of a dataflow graph. The advantage of our approach is that the code generation with SPGen enables more comprehensive low-level optimization in the OpenACC compiler. The preliminary evaluation results show that, for some kernels, the proposed method, which translates the OpenACC C code into OpenCL and SPGen codes, can perform optimization in the lower level more explicitly than the OpenCL-only method, which translates the OpenACC C code into the OpenCL code only. We also observed that more resources might be consumed in the proposed method. However, implementations of both methods are preliminary. We believe improving code generation will fix the problems such as high resource consumption.