Future Technologies Colloquium Series

ABSTRACT:

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are gaining traction in the high performance computing community, since they can be used to implement massively pipelined systems that have been proved effective for many applications. Within the high performance computing domain, applications are developed primarily using high-level software languages. For wider adoption of FPGAs in this domain, the FPGA compilation flow should provide a software-like development experience. This paper presents CHiMPS, a software-like compilation flow for FPGAs. The CHiMPS tools presently compile C programs to FPGAs. CHiMPS adopts a target assembly language based approach to make the compilation of high-level languages onto FPGAs similar to software compilation flow. At the same time CHiMPS provides a programming model to take advantage of the parallelism inherent to FPGA architectures. Presently, the spectral transform shallow water model code is being analyzed to be compiled using CHiMPS. The plan is to port this application using CHiMPS on to the Berkeley Emulation Engine2 (BEE2) system. This talk will also provide some preliminary results from this analysis.