Paper at LCTES 2012

This week, Marcela Zuluaga will present our paper on a machine-learning approach to predict Pareto-Optimal designs produced by high-level hardware generation tools such as Spiral at Languages, Compilers, Tools and Theory for Embedded Systems (LCTES 12). This work was performed with Marcela Zuluaga, Andreas Krause, and Markus Püschel at ETH Zurich.

“Smart” Design Space Sampling to Predict Pareto-Optimal Solutions. Marcela Zuluaga, Andreas Krause, Peter Milder, and Markus Püschel. LCTES 2012.

You can find the paper here. This paper has been nominated for the best paper award (3 papers nominated out of 18). You can read about prior work on generating sorting networks here, and prior work on generating linear transforms with Spiral here.

Abstract: Many high-level synthesis tools offer degrees of freedom in mapping high-level specifications to Register-Transfer Level descriptions. These choices do not affect the functional behavior but span a design space of different cost-performance tradeoffs. In this paper we present a novel machine learning-based approach that efficiently determines the Pareto-optimal designs while only sampling and synthesizing a fraction of the design space. The approach combines three key components: (1) A regression model based on Gaussian processes to predict area and throughput based on synthesis training data. (2) A “smart” sampling strategy, GP-PUCB, to iteratively refine the model by carefully selecting the next design to synthesize to maximize progress. (3) A stopping criterion based on assessing the accuracy of the model without access to complete synthesis data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach using IP generators for discrete Fourier transforms and sorting networks. However, our algorithm is not specific to this application and can be applied to a wide range of Pareto front prediction problems.

LCTES results

 

This entry was posted on June 12, 2012.