Mapping high level algorithms onto massively parallel reconfigurable hardware
Issam Damaj, John P. Hawkins, Ali E. Abdallah · 2003
Summary form only given, as follows. We focus on implementing high level functional algorithms in reconfigurable hardware. The approach adopts the transformational programming paradigm for deriving massively parallel algorithms from functional specifications. It extends previous work by systematically generating efficient circuits and mapping them onto reconfigurable hardware. The massive parallelisation of the algorithm works by carefully composing "off the shelf" highly parallel implementations of each of the basic building blocks involved in the algorithm. These basic building blocks are a small collection of well-known higher order functions such as map, fold, and zipwith. By using function decomposition and data refinement techniques, these powerful functions are refined into highly parallel implementations described in Hoare's CSP. The CSP descriptions are very closely associated with Handle-C program fragments. Handle-C is a programming language based on C and extended by parallelism and communication primitives taken from CSP. In the final stage the circuit description is generated by compiling Handle-C programs and then mapped onto the targeted reconfigurable hardware such as the RC-1000 FPGA system from Celoxica. This approach is illustrated by a case study involving the generation of several versions of the matrix multiplication algorithm.