P30 - Improving the Flow: Introducing the Lucent Dataflow Programming Language for FPGAs
Presenter
DescriptionDataflow architectures, and specifically Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), are demonstrating early but significant potential benefits to HPC. Whilst the community has explored this technology before, recent advances in hardware capability and software environments have made them a far more serious proposition as a new HPC computing paradigm. However, whilst it is now possible to write kernels in C/C++ and synthesize these to the underlying circuitry, without completely redesigning algorithms from a dataflow perspective one is typically stuck with poor performance. The simple reason is that these imperative languages are based on a Von-Neumann rather than dataflow architecture, and instead there is a role for using dataflow programming languages where the development of these forms of computation for FPGAs is far more natural. This was an active area of research over 40 years ago, when dataflow languages such as Lucid appeared, but at the time the hardware was lacking. We will introduce Lucent, a declarative language for FPGAs which is a derivative of Lucid and combines the dataflow computing paradigm with modern programming language features. The result is a programming language which, when mastered, enables fast development of high performance kernels on FPGAs tuned specifically for these dataflow architectures.
TimeTuesday, 6 July 202117:30 - 19:00 CEST
Location
SessionPoster Session
Event Type
Poster
Author
