https://github.com/UCLA-VAST/soda
Stencil computation is one of the most important kernels in many application domains such as image processing, solving partial differential equations, and cellular automata. Many of the stencil kernels are complex, usually consist of multiple stages or iterations, and often contain redundant computation. Such kernels are often offloaded to FPGAs to take advantages of the efficiency of dedicated hardware accelerators. However, implementing such complex kernels efficiently is not trivial, due to complicated data dependencies, difficulties of programming FPGAs with RTL, as well as large design space, especially when parallelization, communication reuse, and computation reuse are all taken into consideration.
SODA is an automated framework for implementing Stencil algorithms with Optimized Datalow Architecture on FPGAs. The SODA microarchitecture minimizes the on-chip reuse buffer size required by full data reuse and provides flexible and scalable fine-grained parallelism with redundant computation eliminated. The SODA automation framework takes high-level user input and generates efficient, high-frequency dataflow implementation. This significantly reduces the difficulty of programming FPGAs efficiently for stencil algorithms. The SODA design-space exploration framework models the resource constraints and searches for the performance-optimized configuration with accurate models for post-synthesis resource utilization and on-board execution throughput.
