Using System Hyper Pipelining (SHP) to Improve the Performance of a Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) Mapped on an FPGA

Abstract: The well known method C-Slow Retiming (CSR) can be used to automatically convert a given CPU into a multithreaded CPU with independent threads. These CPUs are then called streaming or barrel processors. System Hyper Pipelining (SHP) adds a new flexibility on top of CSR by allowing a dynamic number of threads to be executed and by enabling the threads to be stalled, bypassed and reordered. SHP is now applied on the programming elements (PE) of a coarse-grained reconfigurable architecture (CGRA). By using SHP, more performance can be achieved per PE. Fork-Join operations can be implemented on a PE using the flexibility provided by SHP to dynamically adjust the number of threads per PE. Multiple threads can share the same data locally, which greatly reduces the data traffic load on the CGRA's routing structure. The paper shows the results of a CGRA using SHP-ed RISC-V cores as PEs implemented on a FPGA.