When HLS Meets FPGA HBM: Benchmarking and Bandwidth Optimization

Abstract: With the recent release of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) based FPGA boards, developers can now exploit unprecedented external memory bandwidth. This allows more memory-bounded applications to benefit from FPGA acceleration. However, we found that it is not easy to fully utilize the available bandwidth when developing some applications with high-level synthesis (HLS) tools. This is due to the limitation of existing HLS tools when accessing HBM board's large number of independent external memory channels. In this paper, we measure the performance of three recent representative HBM FPGA boards (Intel's Stratix 10 MX and Xilinx's Alveo U50/U280 boards) with microbenchmarks and analyze the HLS overhead. Next, we propose HLS-based optimization techniques to improve the effective bandwidth when a PE accesses multiple HBM channels or multiple PEs access an HBM channel. Our experiment demonstrates that the effective bandwidth improves by 2.4X-3.8X. We also provide a list of insights for future improvement of the HBM FPGA HLS design flow.