DSAGEN: Synthesizing Programmable Spatial Accelerators

Domain-specific hardware accelerators can provide orders of magnitude speedup and energy efficiency over general purpose processors. However, they require extensive manual effort in hardware design and software stack development. Automated ASIC generation (eg. HLS) can be insufficient, because the hardware becomes inflexible. An ideal accelerator generation framework would be automatable, enable deep specialization to the domain, and maintain a uniform programming interface.

Our insight is that many prior accelerator architectures can be approximated by composing a small number of hardware primitives, specifically those from spatial architectures. With careful design, a compiler can understand how to use available primitives, with modular and composable transformations, to take advantage of the features of a given program. This suggests a paradigm where accelerators can be generated by searching within such a rich accelerator design space, guided by the affinity of input programs for hardware primitives and their interactions.

We use this approach to develop the DSAGEN framework, which automates the hardware/software co-design process for reconfigurable accelerators. For several existing accelerators, our evaluation demonstrates that the compiler can achieve 80% of the performance of manually tuned versions. For automated design space exploration, we target multiple sets of workloads which prior accelerators are design for; the generated hardware has mean 1.3× perf 2 /mm 2 over prior programmable accelerators.