An Automatic Mixed Software Hardware Pipeline Builder for CPU-FPGA Platforms

TL;DR

Courier-FPGA is an automated toolchain that accelerates applications on CPU-FPGA platforms by dynamically constructing and replacing function pipelines without source code modifications, achieving significant speedups.

Contribution

It introduces an automatic, runtime-based pipeline builder for CPU-FPGA systems that requires no user intervention or source code changes.

Findings

Achieved 15.36x speedup in a corner detection application.

Automatically constructs function call graphs and offloads functions to FPGA.

Operates without source code modifications or recompilation.

Abstract

Our toolchain for accelerating application called Courier-FPGA, is designed for utilize the processing power of CPU-FPGA platforms for software programmers and non-expert users. It automatically gathers runtime information of library functions from a running target binary, and constructs the function call graph including input-output data. Then, it uses corresponding predefined hardware modules if these are ready for FPGA and prepares software functions on CPU by using Pipeline Generator. The Pipeline Generator builds a pipeline control program by using Intel Threading Building Block to run both hardware modules and software functions in parallel. Finally, Courier-FPGA dynamically replaces the original functions in the binary and accelerates it by using the built pipeline. Courier-FPGA performs these acceleration processes without user intervention, source code tweaks or re-compilations of the binary. We describe the technical details of this mixed software hardware pipeline on CPU-FPGA platforms in this paper. In our case study, Courier-FPGA was used to accelerate a corner detection using the Harris-Stephens method application binary on the Zynq platform. A series of functions were off-loaded, and speed up 15.36 times was achieved by using the built pipeline.