Abstract Parallelizing Applications into Silicon

The next decade of computing will be dominated by embedded systems, information appliances and application-speci c computers. In order to build these systems, designers will need high-level compilation and CAD tools that generate architectures that e ectively meet the needs of each application. In this paper we present a novel compilation system that allows sequential programs, written in C or FOR-TRAN, to be compiled directly into custom silicon or recon gurable architectures. This capability is also interesting because trends in computer architecture are moving towards more recon gurable hardware-like substrates, suchasFPGA based systems. Our system works by successfully combining two resource-e cient computing disciplines: Small Memories and Virtual Wires. For a given application, the compiler rst analyzes the memory access patterns of pointers and arrays in the program and constructs a partitioned memory system made up of many small memories. The computation is implemented by active computing elements that are spatially distributed within the memory array. A space-time scheduler assigns instructions to the computing elements in a way that maximizes locality and minimizes physical communication distance. It also generates an e cient static schedule for the interconnect. Finally, specialized hardware for the resulting schedule of memory accesses, wires, and computation is generated as a multi-process state machine in synthesizable Verilog. With this system, implementedasasetofSUIFcompiler passes, we have successfully compiled programs into hardware and achieve specialization performance enhancements by up to an order of magnitude versus a single generalpurpose processor. We also achieve additional parallelization speedups similar to those obtainable using a tightlyinterconnected multiprocessor.