Accelerating Parallel Computations with OpenMP-Driven System-on-Chip Generation for FPGAs

The task-based programming paradigm offers a portable way of writing parallel applications. However, it requires tedious tuning of the application for performance. We present a novel design flow where programmers can use application knowledge to easily generate a System-on-Chip (SoC) specialized in executing the application. Our design flow uses a compiler that automatically generates task-specific cores and packs them into a custom SoC. A SoC-specific runtime systems schedules tasks on cores to accelerate application execution. The generated SoC shows up to 6000 times performance improvement in comparison to the Altera NiosII/s processor and up to 7 times compared to an AMD Opteron 6172 core. Our design flow helps programmers generate high-performance systems without requiring tuning and prior hardware design knowledge.QC 20150319