[llvm-dev] Proposal for CIRCT incubator project

[Stephen Neuendorffer via llvm-dev]

Thanks Hal,

The front-end question is still a tricky one.  Having a low level CDFG in
MLIR doesnt really offer much and I see rebuilding the clang code generator
to emit loops directly in MLIR as a complex piece of work.  I think the
most natural place to interact with Vivado HLS is towards the backend at
the moment where MLIR could give more points of interaction late in the HLS
flow.  Eventually the community will sort out the front-end questions do
tackling that hasn't been high on my list.  Simply rebuilding HLS flows is
also not necessarily the goal here, although it's a natural place to
start.  From a Xilinx perspective we also have heterogeneous devices with
lots of vector VLIW cores.  Integrating them into an HLS-like flow is also
very interesting.

Steve

On Sun, Jul 5, 2020, 8:28 AM Hal Finkel <hfinkel at anl.gov> wrote:

> Hi, Steve,
>
> I think it would be great to have hardware-synthesis capabilities in the
> LLVM project. The incubation process discussion may be ongoing, but as that
> settles, this seems like a good candidate to me.
>
> Out of curiosity, many existing HLS tools use C/C++-derived input
> languages, and as Clang produces LLVM, do you have any plans for a
> converter between LLVM and your MLIR dialects? Or are you just targeting
> other kinds of frontends?
>
> Thanks again,
>
> Hal
> On 7/4/20 5:29 PM, Stephen Neuendorffer via llvm-dev wrote:
>
>
> For the past several months, members of the ‘CIRCT’ group have been
> working to begin adapting MLIR for hardware design.  We believe that this
> area would benefit from good open source infrastructure enabling research
> and, eventually, the next generation of commercial tools.  We have
> collected several dialects and envision a number of lowering flows using
> these dialects.  We have reached the point where we are ready to share our
> ideas more widely and would like to be considered as an LLVM incubator
> project.
> Our code exists at https://github.com/circt as an out-of-tree MLIR
> project and our group charter can be found at
> https://github.com/circt/circt/blob/master/README.md.   We have weekly
> discussions with a group of about 20 people from Xilinx, SiFive, Microsoft,
> PNNL, ETH Zurich, EPFL, Stanford, and Cornell, and welcome additional
> contributions.  This project is still early and we see many elements as
> highly experimental.  At the same time, we feel that the only way to vet
> these ideas is to build larger systems which will likely take some time and
> community investment. The LLVM incubator process would be a good way to
> help us organize this effort.
>
> Steve Neuendorffer
> Xilinx Research Labs
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing listllvm-dev at lists.llvm.orghttps://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
> --
> Hal Finkel
> Lead, Compiler Technology and Programming Languages
> Leadership Computing Facility
> Argonne National Laboratory
>
>
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