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  4. Designing Machine Learning Accelerators via High-Level Synthesis Through Calyx

Designing Machine Learning Accelerators via High-Level Synthesis Through Calyx

File(s)
Xie_cornell_0058O_12584.pdf (664.1 KB)
No Access Until
2026-09-09
Permanent Link(s)
https://doi.org/10.7298/4mfp-yy52
https://hdl.handle.net/1813/120653
Collections
Cornell Theses and Dissertations
Author
Xie, Jiahan
Abstract

As applications grow in complexity and performance demand, general-purpose processors are no longer optimal for many domains due to their limited efficiency and high energy overhead in computation-intensive tasks. This is particularly evident in the field of machine learning (ML), where model sizes and usage have grown exponentially, making CPUs ill-suited for inference and training workloads. Although custom hardware accelerators offer significant performance and energy efficiency gains, designing them at the register-transfer level (RTL) is time-consuming and error-prone. Furthermore, the vast majority of ML programs are written in Python, a high-level language that is far removed from RTL design. To bridge this semantic gap, we present a complete open-source compiler toolchain that translates ML models written in Python into synthesizable SystemVerilog, targeting FPGAs as the hardware backend. Our toolchain leverages Calyx, a structured intermediate representation designed for hardware accelerators, and is integrated into the CIRCT project for extensibility and analysis. In addition to building the end-to-end flow, we design and implement a set of compiler passes for memory partitioning, enabling effective parallelism in memory-intensive ML workloads. Experimental results demonstrate that our compiler can effectively generate hardware from high-level ML models and achieve performance gains through static memory banking optimizations.

Description
31 pages
Date Issued
2025-08
Committee Chair
Sampson, Adrian
Committee Member
Zhang, Zhiru
Degree Discipline
Computer Science
Degree Name
M.S., Computer Science
Degree Level
Master of Science
Type
dissertation or thesis

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