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International Journal of Parallel Programming

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24-01-2023

Accelerating OCaml Programs on FPGA

Authors: Loïc Sylvestre, Emmanuel Chailloux, Jocelyn Sérot

Published in: International Journal of Parallel Programming | Issue 2-3/2023

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Abstract

This paper aims to exploit the massive parallelism of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) by programming them in OCaml, a multiparadigm and statically typed language. It first presents O2B, an implementation of the OCaml virtual machine using a softcore processor to run the entire OCaml language on an FPGA. It then introduces Macle, a language to express, in ML-style, hardware-accelerated user-defined functions, implemented as gates and registers on the same FPGA. Macle allows to implement pure computations and compose them in parallel. It also supports processing of dynamic data structures such as arrays, matrices and trees allocated by the OCaml runtime in the memory of the softcore processor. Macle functions can then be called, as hardware accelerators, by OCaml programs executed by O2B. This combination of Macle and OCaml codes in a single source program enables to easily prototype FPGA applications mixing numeric and symbolic computations.

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https://github.com/janestreet/hardcaml.

A softcore processor is a processor implemented in the reconfigurable part of an FPGA.

Such as AMD Vivado HLS and Intel OpenCL SDK.

https://github.com/jserot/O2B.

https://github.com/lsylvestre/macle.

This process is general and can be adapted to target other FPGA families.

Avalon bus for Intel platforms.

The FPGA board is connected to a host PC via an UART connection for printing and debugging.

Each call of these functions is specialized and inlined at compile time.

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Title: Accelerating OCaml Programs on FPGA
Authors: Loïc Sylvestre
Emmanuel Chailloux
Jocelyn Sérot
Publication date: 24-01-2023
Publisher: Springer US
Published in: International Journal of Parallel Programming / Issue 2-3/2023
Print ISSN: 0885-7458
Electronic ISSN: 1573-7640
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10766-022-00748-z

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