Home News People Research Study Search

Institute for Computing Systems Architecture

Professor Greg Steffan,
University of Toronto

ICSA SEMINAR SERIES TALK
THURSDAY,30 JULY 2009
Appleton Tower, Room 2.14
1530HRS

Parallelizing FPGA CAD with Transactional Memory

Abstract:

The microprocessor technology road-map predicts a future with tens to hundreds of processors per chip and beyond, but with limited clock frequency improvements and likely simpler individual processors. Faced with the corresponding demise of sequential program performance, the software industry is compelled to parallelize existing software by introducing threads and synchronization to target these multicore processors. None feels the pinch more dramatically than the FPGA companies who's CAD software (i) must manipulate hardware designs that are themselves growing with Moore's law, but (ii) is composed of a large number of sequential algorithms. While progress has been made on parallelizing the most crucial algorithms (at great expense), future parallelization efforts will require a more cost-effective approach.
Transactional Memory (TM) promises an easier, optimistic alternative to locks for critical sections---allowing programmers to avoid deadlock and other bugs when synchronizing code, and also allowing critical sections to execute in parallel whenever they operate on independent data. In this talk I will summarize our recent work on using TM to parallelize simulated-annealing-based placement for FPGAs---in particular, we used a software-TM (TinySTM) to parallelize the placement phase of Versatile Place and Route (VPR) 5.0.2. Using TM allowed us to very quickly produce a parallel and correct version of the software, and to then focus on incrementally tuning performance. I will describe our experiences in tuning the STM and CAD software, and the interesting algorithmic trade-offs that exist in this application area. In the end we find that transactionalized placement has the potential for scalable performance, but that hardware support for TM is likely required to overcome overheads.
Biography:

Greg Steffan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto. His expertise is in computer architecture and compilers, and his research currently targets methods of exploiting parallelism in multicore processors and FPGAs. Greg completed his doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University in 2003, after undergraduate and Masters degrees at the University of Toronto in 1995 and 1997 respectively. He is a recipient of the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation Early Researcher Award Award (2007), a Siebel Scholar (2002), an IBM CAS Faculty Fellow, and a senior member of IEEE and ACM.


Home : Colloquium 

Please contact our webadmin with any comments or changes.
Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all material is copyright © The University of Edinburgh.