Abstraction

Hardware acceleration

Epistemology

Computer engineering

Computer architecture

Philosophy

Compiler

Parallel computing

Embedded system

Implementation

Design space exploration

Programming language

Computer science

Computation

Field-programmable gate array

Hardware specialization is a promising trend to sustain performance growth. Spatial hardware accelerators that employ specialized and hierarchical computation and memory resources have recently shown high performance gains for tensor applications such as deep learning, scientific computing, and data mining. To harness the power of these hardware accelerators, programmers have to use specialized instructions with certain hardware constraints. However, these hardware accelerators and instructions are quite new and there is a lack of understanding of the hardware abstraction, performance optimization space, and automatic methodologies to explore the space. Existing compilers use hand-tuned computation implementations and optimization templates, resulting in sub-optimal performance and heavy development costs.

AMOS