AutoRARE: An Automated Tool For Generating FPGA-Based Multi-Memory Hardware Accelerators For Compute-Intensive Applications

In this paper, we present AutoRARE, a Java-based automated design tool for generating Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based hardware accelerators. AutoRARE automatically generates all VHDL models needed to build/synthesize a processor specifically tailored for each application. The user needs only provide the VHDL description of a special-purpose floating point Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) or function core. The tool generates the VHDL description for the memory interface, memory controller, host processor interface, and the application specific processor. We also present details of the FPGA-based multi-memory hardware accelerator for accelerating computationally intensive applications, generated using AutoRARE. The multi-memory hardware accelerator is highly pipelined and able to simultaneously read and write multiple floating point values from multiple memories. The multi-memory architecture is the key to providing hardware accelerators that execute 10X-100X faster than typical multi-core processors. The Taylor Series expansion of the sine/cosine function is used as an application to demonstrate the merits of the multi-memory hardware accelerator. In our experiments, we executed the Taylor Series in software and compared execution times with an FPGA-based hardware implementation. Our experiments show that the FPGA-based multi-memory Taylor Series hardware accelerator is 481X faster than software executing the Taylor Series on a typical server.