Dynamic hazard resolution for pipelining irregular loops in high-level synthesis

Abstract

Current pipelining approach in high-level synthesis (HLS) achieves high performance for applications with regular and statically analyzable memory access patterns. However, it cannot effectively handle infrequent data-dependent structural and data hazards because they are conservatively assumed to always occur in the synthesized pipeline. To enable high-throughput pipelining of irregular loops, we study the problem of augmenting HLS with application-specific dynamic hazard resolution, and examine its implications on scheduling and quality of results. We propose to generate an aggressive pipeline at compile-time while resolving hazards with memory port arbitration and squash-and-replay at run-time. Our experiments targeting a Xilinx FPGA demonstrate promising performance improvement across a suite of representative benchmarks.