Primate: A Framework to Automatically Generate Soft Processors for Network Applications

Overlay processors on FPGAs enable i) software programmability through sequential code calling library functions, ii) high performance by converting the library calls to invocations of corresponding accelerators, and iii) faster deployment than reprogramming the FPGA. Traditionally, overlays have been hand-written in RTL and programmed through handwritten assembly. We present the Primate framework, which automatically generates overlays from applications written in annotated C++. We evaluated Primate on Whippersnapper (Dang et al. 2017) P4 benchmarks. Primate Overlay latencies are 0.06x - 0.15x compared to PISCES (Shahbaz et al. 2016), a high-performance CPU solution, and 0.25x - 2.3x compared to solutions generated by P4FPGA (Wang et al. 2017), a P4 HLS compiler on FPGA.