At FPL 2021, my PhD student Jianyi Cheng (jointly supervised by John Wickerson) will present our short paper “Exploiting the Correlation between Dependence Distance and Latency in Loop Pipelining for HLS”. In this post, I explain the simple idea behind this paper and how it can significantly accelerate certain neglected corner cases in high-level synthesis (HLS).
By far the most significant way to extract high performance from a hardware accelerator in high-level synthesis is to use loop pipelining. Loop pipelining is the idea of starting the next iteration of a loop before the previous one finishes, allowing multiple iterations to be executing simultaneously. However, some loop iterations may need a result produced by earlier loop iterations, limiting the extent to which this can be done. HLS tools generally determine a ‘safe’ initiation interval – the number of clock cycles between starting two adjacent loop iterations – and then schedule the iterations statically at multiples of this interval.
This limit on initiation interval of the loop essentially derives from two properties. Firstly, if it takes a long time for the computation of a loop iteration to execute, then any iterations waiting on its result must be delayed. But secondly if an iteration’s result is only needed many iterations later, it can afford to take a long time to compute: what’s the rush? These two factors – latency and dependence distance – together determine the safe initiation interval.
The simple observation of our paper is that typically HLS tools will generally independently over-approximate latency and under-approximate dependence distance. However, there are some examples of programs where there is a correlation between dependence distance and latency. Jianyi gives this nice motivating example in the paper:
double f( double a ) {
return (((((a+0.64)*a+0.7)*a+0.21)*a+0.33)*a+0.25)*a+0.125;
}
void example( double vec[M] ) {
for (int i = 0; i < N; i++) {
double e = vec[i];
if (e > 0) vec[i+63] = f(e);
else vec[i*i+9] = e * e;
}
}
In this code snippet, you can see two control paths in the loop. The if branch has a long latency (it computes the Horner scheme polynomial f) but also writes to elements of vec that only get read many iterations later. Meanwhile the else branch has a short latency but can write – in the early stages of the loop at least – to values read in nearby iterations.
The end result is that the commercial tools Jianyi tried don’t cope very well with scheduling this loop. However, Jianyi has developed an approach that uses the formal verification tool Boogie to show that this loop can actually be scheduled very efficiently by exploiting this correlation.
He has developed an LLVM pass called iiProver that proves that it is safe to use a certain II with the commercial Vitis HLS tool from Xilinx. iiProver and our benchmarks are available – please take a look: https://github.com/JianyiCheng/iiProver. And you can hear Jianyi talking about his work on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SdQeBBc85jc.
Thinking 