An OpenCL software compilation framework targeting an SoC-FPGA VLIW chip multiprocessor

• Published in: Journal of systems architecture 2016-08, Vol.68, p.17-37
• Main Authors: Parker, Samuel J., Chouliaras, Vassilios A.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Architecture; Architecture (computers); Benchmarks; Compilation; Computer architecture; Computer programs; Computer simulation; FPGA; Hardware; Heterogeneous computing; Multi-core; Multiprocessor; OpenCL; Scalability; Software; Studies; Systems design
• ISSN: 1383-7621; 1873-6165
• DOI: 10.1016/j.sysarc.2016.06.003

Modern systems-on-chip augment their baseline CPU with coprocessors and accelerators to increase overall computational capability and power efficiency, and thus have evolved into heterogeneous multi-core systems. Several languages have been developed to enable this paradigm shift, including CUDA and OpenCL. This paper discusses a unified compilation environment to enable heterogeneous system design through the use of OpenCL and a highly configurable VLIW Chip Multiprocessor architecture known as the LE1. An LLVM compilation framework was researched and a prototype developed to enable the execution of OpenCL applications on a number of hardware configurations of the LE1 CMP. The presented OpenCL framework fully automates the compilation flow and supports work-item coalescing which better maps onto the ILP processor cores of the LE1 architecture. This paper discusses in detail both the software stack and target hardware architecture and evaluates the scalability of the proposed framework by running 12 industry-standard OpenCL benchmarks drawn from the AMD SDK and the Rodinia suites. The benchmarks are executed on 40 LE1 configurations with 10 implemented on an SoC-FPGA and the remaining on a cycle-accurate simulator. Across 12 OpenCL benchmarks results demonstrate near-linear wall-clock performance improvement of 1.8 × (using 2 dual-issue cores), up to 5.2 × (using 8 dual-issue cores) and on one case, super-linear improvement of 8.4 × (FixOffset kernel, 8 dual-issue cores). The number of OpenCL benchmarks evaluated makes this study one of the most complete in the literature.