Next week, my former PhD student and postdoctoral researcher, Felix Winterstein, will present our paper Pass a Pointer: Exploring Shared Virtual Memory Abstractions in OpenCL Tools for FPGAs at the IEEE International Conference on Field-Programmable Technology in Melbourne, Australia.
Before launching his current startup, Xelera, Felix and I worked together on the problem of automating the production of custom memory systems for FPGA-based accelerators. I previously blogged about some highly novel work we’d done during his PhD on high-level synthesis for code manipulating complex data structures like trees and linked lists. Full detail can be found in the book version of his PhD thesis. All this work – as exciting as it is – was based on sequential C code description as the input format to a high-level synthesis tool.
Many readers of this blog will be aware that OpenCL is rapidly becoming viewed as an alternative way to write correctness-portable code for FPGA development, with both Intel and Xilinx offering OpenCL flows based around OpenCL 1.X. However, OpenCL 2.0 offers a number of interesting features around shared virtual memory which could radically simplify programming, at the cost of making the compiler significantly more complex for FPGA-based computation. It is this issue we address in the paper Felix will present next week.
There’s lots of exciting program analysis work that could be built on top of Felix’s framework, and I’m keen to explore this further – if a reader of this blog would like to collaborate in this direction or like to do a PhD in this field, feel free to get in touch.
Perhaps most importantly, Felix’s framework is open source – check it out at https://github.com/constantinides/FPGA-shared-mem and let us know if you use it!
Thinking 