Developing Dynamic Profiling and Debugging Support in OpenCL for FPGAs

Abstract

With FPGAs emerging as a promising accelerator for general-purpose computing, there is a strong demand to make them accessible to software developers. Recent advances in OpenCL compilers for FPGAs pave the way for synthesizing FPGA hardware from OpenCL kernel code. To enable broader adoption of this paradigm, significant challenges remain. This paper presents our efforts in developing dynamic profiling and debugging support in OpenCL for FPGAs. We first propose primitive code patterns, including a timestamp and an event-ordering function, and then develop a framework, which can be plugged easily into OpenCL kernels, to dynamically collect and process run-time information.