Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

Typescript, etc. / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

High-level synthesis (HLS) has simplified the design process for energy-efficient hardware accelerators: a designer specifies an accelerator’s behavior in a “high-level” language, and a toolchain synthesizes register-transfer level (RTL) code from this specification. Many HLS systems produce efficient hardware designs for regular algorithms (i.e., those with limited conditionals or regular memory access patterns), but most struggle with irregular algorithms that rely on dynamic, data-dependent memory access patterns (e.g., traversing pointer-based structures like lists, trees, or graphs). HLS tools typically provide imperative, side-effectful languages to the designer, which makes it difficult to correctly specify and optimize complex, memory-bound applications. In this dissertation, I present an alternative HLS methodology that leverages properties of functional languages to synthesize hardware for irregular algorithms. The main contribution is an optimizing compiler that translates pure functional programs into modular, parallel dataflow networks in hardware. I give an overview of this compiler, explain how its source and target together enable parallelism in the face of irregularity, and present two specific optimizations that further exploit this parallelism. Taken together, this dissertation verifies my thesis that pure functional programs exhibiting irregular memory access patterns can be compiled into specialized hardware and optimized for parallelism. This work extends the scope of modern HLS toolchains. By relying on properties of pure functional languages, our compiler can synthesize hardware from programs containing constructs that commercial HLS tools prohibit, e.g., recursive functions and dynamic memory allocation. Hardware designers may thus use our compiler in conjunction with existing HLS systems to accelerate a wider class of algorithms than before.

No description available.

Specifying varying speeds and temporal relationships is necessary when programming graphical animations, but support for temporal programming has usually been done by adding new language features to a Visual Programming Language (VPL), and these features must be mastered over and above the other aspects of the VPL. However, some researchers have believed that time should be able to be treated like just another dimension. In this thesis, we explore whether temporal programming can indeed be done using exactly the same devices as in spatial programming in grid-oriented VPLs. Toward this end, we provide a continuum of models aimed at this goal and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Also, we identify core issues that help illuminate the essence of the problem. / Graduation date: 2001

The programming language Cforall extends the C language with, among other things, overloading, parametric polymorphism, and functions that can return multiple values from a single call. This thesis presents an outline of the first implementation of the core Cforall language. An effective implementation of Cforall requires complete support for new language constructs while preserving the behaviour and efficiency of existing C programs. Analyzing the meaning of Cforall programs requires significantly more sophisticated techniques than are necessary for C programs; existing techniques for the analysis of overloading and polymorphism are adapted and extended to apply to Cforall. Three strategies for generating code for polymorphic programs are compared, using plain C as an intermediate representation. Finally, a realistic Cforall program is presented and characteristics of the generated C code are examined.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--York University, 2007. Graduate Programme in Computer Science. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 153-157). Also available on the Internet. MODE OF ACCESS via web browser by entering the following URL: http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?url_ver=Z39.88-2004&res_dat=xri:pqdiss&rft_val_fmt=info:ofi/fmt:kev:mtx:dissertation&rft_dat=xri:pqdiss:MR38783

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Stanford University, 1985. / Cover title. "September 1985." Includes bibliographical references and index.