Malleable architecture generator for FPGA computing

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Abstract
The malleable architecture generator (MARGE) is a tool set that translates high-level parallel C to configuration bit streams for field-programmable logic based computing systems. MARGE creates an application-specific instruction set and generates the custom hardware components required to perform exactly those computations specified by the C program. In contrast to traditional fixed-instruction processors, MARGE's dynamic instruction set creation provides for efficient use of hardware resources. MARGE processes intermediate code in which each operation is annotated by the bit lengths of the operands. Each basic block (sequence of straight line code) is mapped into a single custom instruction which contains all the operations and logic inherent in the block. A synthesis phase maps the operations comprising the instructions into register transfer level structural components and control logic which have been optimized to exploit functional parallelism and function unit reuse. As a final stage, commercial technology-specific tools are used to generate configuration bit streams for the desired target hardware. Technology- specific pre-placed, pre-routed macro blocks are utilized to implement as much of the hardware as possible. MARGE currently supports the Xilinx-based Splash-2 reconfigurable accelerator and National Semiconductor's CLAy-based parallel accelerator, MAPA. The MARGE approach has been demonstrated on systolic applications such as DNA sequence comparison.

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