Hardware/software specialization through aspects: The LARA approach

Abstract

LARA is a programming language being developed to complement application code in a host programming language with instrumentation code, for monitoring, logging, and debugging, user's knowledge about specific characteristics of the application, non-functional requirements, and compiler, mapping and synthesis strategies to guide/control design-flows, especially the ones used to map computations to FPGA-based systems. This paper shows how the aspect-oriented approach provided by LARA allows developers to specify complementary program information that can be used by LARA aware design-flows to promote customized FPGA-based software/hardware implementations. Program and compiler/mapping specialization take advantage of specific properties of applications to optimize and customize specific application modules and software/hardware implementations, e.g., according to usage contexts. We illustrate the concept using a hotspot function from a real-life, industrial, application. The results show the importance of program specialization in deriving hardware/software implementations with higher-performance.