DSL-based Design Space Exploration for Temporal and Spatial Parallelism of Custom Stream Computing

Abstract: Stream computation is one of the approaches suitable for FPGA-based custom computing due to its high throughput capability brought by pipelining with regular memory access. To increase performance of iterative stream computation, we can exploit both temporal and spatial parallelism by deepening and duplicating pipelines, respectively. However, the performance is constrained by several factors including available hardware resources on FPGA, an external memory bandwidth, and utilization of pipeline stages, and therefore we need to find the best mix of the different parallelism to achieve the highest performance per power. In this paper, we present a domain-specific language (DSL) based design space exploration for temporally and/or spatially parallel stream computation with FPGA. We define a DSL where we can easily design a hierarchical structure of parallel stream computation with abstract description of computation. For iterative stream computation of fluid dynamics simulation, we design hardware structures with a different mix of the temporal and spatial parallelism. By measuring the performance and the power consumption, we find the best among them.