Tue 6 Nov 2018 09:15 - 09:30 at Cabot - AI SEPS Chair(s): Ali Jannesari, Yukinori Sato

Field Programmable Gate Arrays, FPGAs, are a widely available configurable hardware design that is commonly used in many domain-specific applications. However, the complexity of its programming interface is currently restricting its usage to highly qualified programmers dedicated to FPGA. In order to democratize FPGAs, many efforts are concentrating on High-Level Synthesis, HLS: the process of compiling a more general language. In that context we propose in this paper PyGA, a proof of concept of a Python to FPGA compiler based on the Numba Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for Python and the Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL. It allows any Python user to use a FPGA card as an accelerator for Python seamlessly. As expected, early performance results are encouraging, but not competitive with compiled CPU version. It emphasis that, to avoid overhead that cannot be compensated otherwise, tightly coupled accelerator design such as Intel Xeon+FPGA are necessary to address larger code base with finer grain kernel. It also shows that HLS compilation and runtime efforts remains to be done to be competitive with modern multi-core CPUs.

Tue 6 Nov

Displayed time zone: Guadalajara, Mexico City, Monterrey change

08:00 - 10:00
AI SEPSAI-SEPS at Cabot
Chair(s): Ali Jannesari Iowa State University, Yukinori Sato Toyohashi University of Technology
08:00
50m
Talk
Deep Learning at ScaleKeynote
AI-SEPS
Prabhat NERSC, Berkeley Lab
08:50
25m
Talk
PIRA: Performance Instrumentation Refinement Automation
AI-SEPS
Jan-Patrick Lehr Graduate School of Computational Engineering, TU Darmstadt, Alexander Hück Institute for Scientific Computing, TU Darmstadt, Christian Bischof Scientific Computing, TU Darmstadt
09:15
15m
Talk
PyGA: A Python to FPGA compiler prototype
AI-SEPS
Yohann Uguen Univ Lyon, INSA Lyon, Inria, CITI, Eric Petit Intel, France
09:30
30m
Talk
Panel discussion
AI-SEPS
P: Yukinori Sato Toyohashi University of Technology, P: Ali Jannesari Iowa State University, P: Shigeru Chiba The University of Tokyo