LightningSimV2: Faster and Scalable Simulation for High-Level Synthesis via Graph Compilation and Optimization

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sarkar, Rishov, Paul, Rachel, Hao, Cong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
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author Sarkar, Rishov
Paul, Rachel
Hao, Cong
author_facet Sarkar, Rishov
Paul, Rachel
Hao, Cong
contents High-Level Synthesis (HLS) enables rapid prototyping of complex hardware designs by translating C or C++ code to low-level RTL code. However, the testing and evaluation of HLS designs still typically rely on slow RTL-level simulators that can take hours to provide feedback, especially for complex designs. A recent work, LightningSim, helps to solve this problem by providing a simulation workflow one to two orders of magnitude faster than RTL simulation. However, it still exhibits inefficiencies due to several types of redundant computation, making it slow for large design simulation and design space exploration. Addressing these inefficiencies, we introduce LightningSimV2, a much faster and scalable simulation tool. LightningSimV2 features three main innovations. First, we perform compile-time static analysis, exploiting the repetitive structures in HLS designs, e.g., loops, to reduce the simulation workload. Second, we propose a novel graph-based simulation approach, with decoupled simulation graph construction step and graph traversal step, significantly reducing repeated computation. Third, benefiting from the decoupled approach, LightningSimV2 can perform incremental stall analysis extremely fast, enabling highly efficient design space exploration of large numbers of complex hardware parameters, e.g., optimal FIFO depths. Moreover, the DSE is well-suited for parallel computing, further improving the DSE efficiency. Compared with LightningSim, LightningSimV2 achieves up to 3.5x speedup in full simulation and up to 577x speed up for incremental DSE. Our code is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/sharc-lab/LightningSim/tree/v0.2.0.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_09471
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LightningSimV2: Faster and Scalable Simulation for High-Level Synthesis via Graph Compilation and Optimization
Sarkar, Rishov
Paul, Rachel
Hao, Cong
Performance
Hardware Architecture
High-Level Synthesis (HLS) enables rapid prototyping of complex hardware designs by translating C or C++ code to low-level RTL code. However, the testing and evaluation of HLS designs still typically rely on slow RTL-level simulators that can take hours to provide feedback, especially for complex designs. A recent work, LightningSim, helps to solve this problem by providing a simulation workflow one to two orders of magnitude faster than RTL simulation. However, it still exhibits inefficiencies due to several types of redundant computation, making it slow for large design simulation and design space exploration. Addressing these inefficiencies, we introduce LightningSimV2, a much faster and scalable simulation tool. LightningSimV2 features three main innovations. First, we perform compile-time static analysis, exploiting the repetitive structures in HLS designs, e.g., loops, to reduce the simulation workload. Second, we propose a novel graph-based simulation approach, with decoupled simulation graph construction step and graph traversal step, significantly reducing repeated computation. Third, benefiting from the decoupled approach, LightningSimV2 can perform incremental stall analysis extremely fast, enabling highly efficient design space exploration of large numbers of complex hardware parameters, e.g., optimal FIFO depths. Moreover, the DSE is well-suited for parallel computing, further improving the DSE efficiency. Compared with LightningSim, LightningSimV2 achieves up to 3.5x speedup in full simulation and up to 577x speed up for incremental DSE. Our code is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/sharc-lab/LightningSim/tree/v0.2.0.
title LightningSimV2: Faster and Scalable Simulation for High-Level Synthesis via Graph Compilation and Optimization
topic Performance
Hardware Architecture
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.09471