source: anr/section-3.2.tex @ 32

% les objectifs scientifiques/techniques du projet.
The objectives of COACH project are to develop a complete framework to HPC
(accelerating solutions for existing software applications) and embedded
applications (implementing an application on a low power standalone
device).  The design steps are presented figure~\ref{coach-flow}.
\begin{figure}[hbtp]\leavevmode\center
  \includegraphics[width=.8\linewidth]{flow}
  \caption{\label{coach-flow} COACH flow}
\end{figure}
\begin{description}
\item[HPC setup] Here the user splits the application into 2 parts: the host application
which remains on PC and the SoC application which migrates on SoC. 
The framework provides a simulation model allowing to evaluate the partitioning.
\item[SoC design] In this phase, 
The user can obtain simulators at different abstraction levels of the SoC by giving to COACH framework
a SoC description.  
This description consists of a process network corresponding to the SoC application, 
an OS, an instance of a generic hardware platform
and a mapping of processes on the platform components. The supported mapping are 
software (the process runs on a SoC processor),
XXXpeci (the process runs on a SoC processor enhanced with dedicated instructions),
and hardware (the process runs into a coprocessor generated by HLS and plugged on the SoC bus).
\item[Application compilation] Once SoC description is validated, COACH generates automatically
an FPGA bitstream containing the hardware platform with SoC application software and 
an executable containing the host application. The user can launch the application by
loading the bitstream on FPGA and running the executable on PC.
\end{description}
 
% l'avancee scientifique attendue. Preciser l'originalite et le caractere 
% ambitieux du projet. 
The main scientific contribution of the project is to unify various synthesis techniques
(same input and output formats) allowing the user to swap without engineering effort
from one to an other and even to chain them, for example, to run polyedric transformation 
before synthesis.
Another advantage of this framework is to provide different abstraction levels from
a single description.
Finally, this description is device family independent and its hardware implementation
is automatically generated.

% Detailler les verrous scientifiques et techniques a lever par la realisation du projet.
System design is a very complicated task and in this project we try to simplify it
as much as possible. For this purpose we have to deal with the following scientific
and technological barriers.
\begin{itemize}
\item The main problem in HPC is the communication between the PC and the SoC.
This problem has 2 aspects. The first one is the efficiency. The second is to 
eliminate enginnering effort to implement it at different abstract levels.
\item COACH design flow has a top-down approach. In the such case,
the required performance of a coprocessor (run frequency, maximum cycles for
a given computation, power consumption, etc) are imposed by the other system
components. The challenge is to allow user to control accurately the synthesis
process. For instance, the run frequency must not be a result of the RTL synthesis
but a strict synthesis constraint.
\item HLS tools are sensitive to the style in which the algorithm is written.
In addition, they are are not integrated into an architecture and system 
exploration tool.
Consequently, engineering work is required to swap from a tool to another,
to integrate the resulting simulation model to an architectural exploration tool 
and to synthesize the generated RTL description.
%CA Additionnal preprocessing, source-level transformations, are thus
%CA required to improve the process.
%CA Particularly, this includes parallelism exposure and efficient memory mapping.
\item Most HLS tools translate a sequential algorithm into a coprocessor
containing a single data-path and finite state machine (FSM). In this way,
only the fine grained parallelism is exploited (ILP parallelism).
The challenge is to identify the coarse grained parallelism and to generate,
from a sequential algorithm, coprocessor containing multiple communicating
tasks (data-paths and FSMs).
\end{itemize}

%Presenter les resultats escomptes en proposant si possible des criteres de reussite 
%et d'evaluation adaptes au type de projet, permettant d'evaluer les resultats en 
%fin de projet.
The main result is the framework. It is composed concretely of: 
2 HPC communication shemes with their implementation, 
5 HLS tools (control dominated HLS, data dominated HLS, Coarse grained HLS, 
Memory optimisation HLS and ASIP),
3 systemC based virtual prototyping environment extended with synthesizable
RTL IP cores (generic, ALTERA/NIOS/AVALON, XILINX/MICROBLAZE/OPB),
one design space exploration tool,
one operating system (OS).
\\
The framework fonctionality will be demonstrated with XXX-EXAMPLE1, XXX-EXAMPLE2
and XXX-EXAMPLE3 on 4 archictures (generic/XILINX, generic/ALTERA,
proprietary/XILINX, proprietary/ALTERA).