A Survey and Evaluation of FPGA High-Level Synthesis Tools

High-level synthesis (HLS) is increasingly popular for the design of high-performance and energy-efficient heterogeneous systems, shortening time-to-market and addressing today's system complexity. HLS allows designers to work at a higher-level of abstraction by using a software program to specify the hardware functionality. Additionally, HLS is particularly interesting for designing field-programmable gate array circuits, where hardware implementations can be easily refined and replaced in the target device. Recent years have seen much activity in the HLS research community, with a plethora of HLS tool offerings, from both industry and academia. All these tools may have different input languages, perform different internal optimizations, and produce results of different quality, even for the very same input description. Hence, it is challenging to compare their performance and understand which is the best for the hardware to be implemented. We present a comprehensive analysis of recent HLS tools, as well as overview the areas of active interest in the HLS research community. We also present a first-published methodology to evaluate different HLS tools. We use our methodology to compare one commercial and three academic tools on a common set of C benchmarks, aiming at performing an in-depth evaluation in terms of performance and the use of resources

Using multi-objective design space exploration to enable run-time resource management for reconfigurable architectures

Resource run-time managers have been shown par- ticularly effective for coordinating the usage of the hardware resources by multiple applications, eliminating the necessity of a full-blown operating system. For this reason, we expect that this technology will be increasingly adopted in emerging multi- application reconfigurable systems. This paper introduces a fully automated design flow that exploits multi-objective design space exploration to enable run- time resource management for the Molen reconfigurable archi- tecture. The entry point of the design flow is the application source code; our flow is able to heuristically determine a set of candidate hardware/software configurations of the application (i.e., operating points) that trade off the occupation of the reconfigurable fabric (in this case, an FPGA), the load of the master processor and the performance of the application itself. This information enables a run-time manager to exploit more efficiently the available system resources in the context of multiple applications. We present the results of an experimental campaign where we applied the proposed design flow to two reference audio appli- cations mapped on the Molen architecture. The analysis proved that the overhead of the design space exploration and operating points extraction with respect to the original Molen flow is within reasonable bounds since the final synthesis time still represents the major contribution. Besides, we have found that there is a high variance in terms of execution time speedup associated with the operating points of the application (characterized by a different usage of the FPGA) which can be exploited by the run-time manager to increase/decrease the quality of service of the application depending on the available resources

DRuiD: Designing reconfigurable architectures with decision-making support

Application development for heterogeneous platforms requires to code and map functionalities on a set of different computing elements. As a consequence, the development process needs a clear understanding of both, application requirements and heterogeneous computing technologies. To support the development process, we propose a framework called DRuiD capable of learning application characteristics that make them suitable for certain computing elements. The framework is composed of an expert system that supports the designer in the mapping decision and gives hints on possible code modifications to be applied to make the functionality more suitable for a computing element. The experimental results are tailored for a heterogeneous and reconfigurable platform (the Xilinx-ml510) including two computational elements, i.e. a Virtex5 FPGA and a PowerPC. The expert system identifies 88.9% of the times what are the functionalities that are accelerated efficiently by using the FPGA, without requiring the kernel porting. Additionally, we present two case studies demonstrating the potentialities of the framework to give hints on high level code modifications for an efficient kernel mapping on the FPGA

Run-time optimization of a dynamically reconfigurable embedded system through performance prediction

A key tool to increase the exploitation of dynamic reconfigurable platforms is the run-time resource manager. This system module coordinates the usage of both software and reconfigurable hardware resources in the context of a multi-programmed environment, by alleviating the operating system's induced overhead. This paper introduces a two-layers run-time resource manager for dynamic reconfigurable platforms. The upper level is composed of several application-level managers (one for each application) that provide the most suitable mapping based on resource constraints and performance prediction. The lower level is composed of a centralized system-level resource manager that assigns the HW/SW resources to each application. We present a video surveillance case study in which the proposed resource management technique outperforms the performance of the state of the art by 28% on average, introducing a computational time overhead within 2%

Considerations regarding the risk of integrity – Romanian developments within the European framework

In the process of risk management process implementation and deployment within the organizations, both public and private, the applicable standards outline the role played the human resources, as the key issue in this respect. Following the standards and the practice in the field, the integrity risks are considered within the framework of a holistic approach. The paper tries to introduce and address the main features of the integrity risks, considering the European approach, based on the quantitative and qualitative measurement through some specific indicators. Besides, the joint-approaches of the developments in the legal framework, and the other international bodies involved in regulation of the field, namely the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and the United Nations Convention against Corruption are outlined. In addition, the public perception indicators regarding the integrity are presented through the comparative examination of the local findings amongst the other European countries and averages, pointing out the specific evolutions. The conclusions highlight the favourable changes and some of the actions required as prerequisites for necessary further improvements. Research background: Defined as the abuse of power oriented towards gain of private benefits, the corruption is a phenomenon that affects the economies and the fair distribution of welfare. Although there is a regulatory framework both at national and international levels, measuring of corruption remains a difficult task, as it often relies on public perception. Purpose of the article: The objectives consist in identification and assessment of integrity risks, besides the implementation of the adequate control tools, in order to ensure their proper monitoring. Methods: Employing the data from the international surveys and indexes used in measurement of the corruption perception, and considering the applicable legal framework, there are examined both the specific trends in Romania, compared to the general developments in the European Union . Findings Value added: Amid a general improvement trend, there are highlighted some slight backward steps and the necessary actions for future improvements. Considering the weak parts specific to the perception surveys, besides their further usage, results the necessity of fostering the using of special designed indexes, which rely, in addition, on aspects that mainly remain out of public perception