Next week my PhD student Nadesh Ramanathan will present his paper (joint work with Wickerson) on Concurrency-Aware Scheduling for High-Level Synthesis at FCCM 2018.
This work is the latest instalment of our approach to scheduling multithreaded software in high-level synthesis while taking advantage of the weak memory behaviour allowable in the C/C++11 standard.
Our previous work analysed, and then synthesised, each thread individually. What this paper adds is the ability to perform an inter-thread analysis – while still synthesising threads individually. It is natural, in hardware synthesis, to assume knowledge of the other threads that are being synthesised at compile time. We show in this paper that such knowledge can – and often does – considerably improve high-level synthesis results, by removing redundant constraints during the scheduling process.
Readers wanting to know a little more before diving into the paper itself could also read John Wickerson’s description of our work.
Thinking 