CollectiveHLS: Ultrafast Knowledge-Based HLS Design Optimization

Abstract

High-level synthesis (HLS) has democratized field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) by enabling high-level device programmability and rapid microarchitecture customization through the use of directives. Nevertheless, the manual selection of the appropriate directives, i.e., the annotations included in the high-level source code to instruct the synthesis process, is a difficult task for programmers without a hardware background. In this letter, we present CollectiveHLS, an ultrafast knowledge-based HLS design optimization method that automatically extracts the most promising directive configurations and applies them to the original source code. The proposed optimization scheme is a fully data-driven approach for generalized HLS tuning, as it is not based on quality of result models or meta-heuristics. We design, implement, and evaluate our method with more than 100 applications of Machsuite, Rodinia, and GitHub on a ZCU104 FPGA. We achieve an average geometric mean speedup of x14.1 and x10.5 compared to the unoptimized, i.e., without HLS directives and optimized designs, a high design feasibility score, and an average inference latency of 38 ms.