On the Usability and Energy Efficiency of High-Level Synthesis for FPGA-based Network-Attached Accelerators
Steffen Christgau, Dylan Everingham, Max Lübke, Marco De Lucia, Danny Puhan, Niklas Schelten, Bettina Schnor, Hannes Signer, Johannes Spazier, Benno Stabernack, Fritjof Steinert, Serhii Yahdzhyiev · 2025
Heterogeneity in high performance computing systems is one of the most promising approaches towards more energy-efficient computing on one hand and satisfying the raising demand of global computation capacity on the other hand. Besides the well-known key components like CPUs and GPGPUs are domain-specific accelerators like TPUs, FPGAs well known for their energy efficiency. This is especially true for highly specialized use cases. Network-attached accelerators promise more scalability and flexibility for FPGA usage in HPC environments. Easy and efficient programming of those accelerators is, however, still an open issue. Based on a framework for such accelerators which enables decoupling of FPGAs from their host system, we present a workflow using High-Level Synthesis (HLS) to offload application kernels to them. We evaluate this approach against a conventional Hardware Description Language (HDL) based workflow. In addition, we introduce the energy measurement tool EMA and assess the energy efficiency of both HLS and HDL design.