Data Reuse and Parallelism in Hardware Compilation

This thesis presents a methodology to automatically determine a data memory organisation at compiletime, suitable to exploit data reuse and loop-level parallelization, in order to achieve high performanceand low power design for data-dominated applications. Moore?s Law has enabled more and more heterogeneouscomponents integrated on a single chip. However, there are challenges to extract maximumperformance from these hardware resources efficiently. Unlike previous approaches, which mainly focus on making efficient use of computational resources,our focus is on data memory organisation and input-output bandwidth considerations, which are thetypical stumbling block of existing hardware compilation schemes. To optimize accesses to large off-chip memories, an approach is adopted and formalized to identify datareuse opportunities in local scratch-pad memory. An approach is presented for evaluating differentdata reuse options in terms of the memory space required by buffering reused data and execution timefor loading the data to the local memories. Determining the data reuse design option that consumesthe least power or performs operations quickest with respect to a memory constraint is a NP-hardproblem. In this work, the problem of data reuse exploration for low-power designs is formulated asa Multiple-Choice Knapsack problem. Together with a proposed power model, the problem is solvedefficiently. An integer geometric programming framework is presented for exploring data reuse andloop-level parallelization within a single step. The objective is to find the design that achieves theshortest execution time for an application. We describe our approaches based on formal optimization techniques, and present some results fromapplying these approaches to several benchmarks that show the advantages of optimizing data memoryorganisation and of exposing the interaction between data memory system design and parallelismextraction to the compiler.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo