CMOST: a system-level FPGA compilation framework

Programming difficulty is a key challenge to the adoption of FPGAs as a general high-performance computing platform. In this paper we present CMOST, an open-source automated compilation flow that maps C-code to FPGAs for acceleration. CMOST establishes a unified framework for the integration of various system-level optimizations and for different hardware platforms. We also present several novel techniques on integrating optimizations in CMOST, including task-level dependence analysis, block-based data streaming, and automated SDF generation. Experimental results show that automatically generated FPGA accelerators can achieve over 8x speedup and 120x energy gain on average compared to the multi-core CPU results from similar input C programs. CMOST results are comparable to those obtained after extensive manual source-code transformations followed by high-level synthesis.