학술논문

Primate: A Framework to Automatically Generate Soft Processors for Network Applications
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Computer Architecture Letters IEEE Comput. Arch. Lett. Computer Architecture Letters. 23(1):57-60 Jan, 2024
Subject
Computing and Processing
Registers
Codes
VLIW
Software
Field programmable gate arrays
Throughput
Libraries
Design methodology
domain-specific accelerators
flexibility
programmability
Language
ISSN
1556-6056
1556-6064
2473-2575
Abstract
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.