Abstract
Modern field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have re- cently powered high-profile efficiency gains in systems from datacenters to embedded devices by offering ensembles of heterogeneous, reconfigurable hardware units. Programming stacks for FPGAs, however, are stuck in the pastÐthey are based on traditional hardware languages, which were appro- priate when FPGAs were simple, homogeneous fabrics of basic programmable primitives. We describe Reticle, a new low-level abstraction for FPGA programming that, unlike existing languages, explicitly represents the special-purpose units available on a particular FPGA device. Reticle has two levels: a portable intermediate language and a target-specific assembly language. We show how to use a standard instruc- tion selection approach to lower intermediate programs to assembly programs, which can be both faster and more ef- fective than the complex metaheuristics that existing FPGA toolchains use. We use Reticle to implement linear algebra operators and coroutines and find that Reticle compilation runs up to 100 times faster than current approaches while producing comparable or better run-time and utilization.
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