GUSTO : general architecture design utility and synthesis tool for optimization

Matrix computations lie at the heart of many scientific computational algorithms including signal processing, computer vision and financial computations. Since matrix computation algorithms are expensive computational tasks, hardware implementations of these algorithms requires substantial time and effort. There is an increasing demand for a domain specific tool for matrix computation algorithms which provides fast and highly efficient hardware production. This thesis presents GUSTO, a novel hardware design tool that provides a push-button transition from high level specification for matrix computation algorithms to hardware description language. GUSTO employs a novel top-to-bottom design methodology to generate correct-by-construction and cycle-accurate application specific architectures. The top-to-bottom design methodology provides simplicity (through the use of a simple tool chain and programming model), flexibility (through the use of different languages, e.g. C/MATLAB, as a high level specification and different parameterization options), scalability (through the ability to handle complex algorithms) and performance (through the use of our novel trimming optimization using a simulate & eliminate method providing results that are similar to these in commercial tools). Although matrix computations are inherently parallel, the algorithms and commercial software tools to exploit parallel processing are still in their infancy. Therefore, GUSTO also provides the ability to divide the given matrix computation algorithms into smaller processing elements providing architectures that are small in area and highly optimized for throughput. These processing elements are then instantiated with hierarchical datapaths in a multi-core fashion. The different design methods and parameterization options that are provided by GUSTO enable the user to study area and performance tradeoffs over a large number of different architectures and find the optimum architecture for the desired objective. GUSTO provides the ability to prototype hardware systems in minutes rather than days or weeks.