Coarse-grained reconfigurable architectures (CGRAs) have emerged as promising accelerators due to their high flexibility and energy efficiency. However, existing open source works often lack integration of CGRAs with CPU systems and corresponding toolchains. Moreover, there is rare support for the accelerator instruction pipelining to overlap data communication, computation, and configuration across multiple tasks. In this article, we propose FDRA, an open source exploration framework for a heterogeneous system-on-chip (SoC) with a RISC-V processor and a dynamically reconfigurable accelerator (DRA) supporting loop, instruction, and task levels of parallelism. FDRA encompasses parameterized SoC modeling, Verilog generation, source-to-source application code transformation using frontend and DRA compilers, SoC simulation, and FPGA prototyping. FDRA incorporates the extraction of periodic accumulative operators and multi-dimensional linear load/store operators from nested loops. The DRA enables accessing the shared L2 cache with virtual addresses and supports direct memory access with arbitrary start addresses and data lengths. Integrated into the RISC-V Rocket SoC, our DRA achieves a remarkable 55× acceleration for loop kernels and improves energy efficiency by 29×. Compared to state-of-the-art RISC-V vector units, our DRA demonstrates a 2.9× speed improvement and 3.5× greater energy efficiency. In contrast to previous CGRA+RISC-V SoCs, our SoC achieves a minimum speedup of 5.2×.

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) emerges as a competitive accelerator due to its high flexibility and energy efficiency. However, most CGRAs are effective for computation-intensive applications with regular loops but struggle with irregular loops containing control flows. These loops introduce fine-grained logic operations and are costly to execute by coarse-grained arithmetic units in CGRA. Efficiently handling such logic operations necessitates incorporating Boolean algebra optimization, which can improve logic density and reduce logic depth. Unfortunately, no previous research has incorporated it into the compilation flow to support irregular loops efficiently. We propose COFFA, an open-source framework for heterogeneous architecture with a RISC-V CPU and a fused-grained reconfigurable accelerator, which integrates coarse-grained arithmetic and fine-grained logic units, along with flexible IO units and distributed interconnects. As a software/hardware co-design framework, COFFA has a powerful compiler that extracts and optimizes fine-grained logic operations from irregular loops, performs coarse-grained arithmetic and memory optimizations, and offloads the loops to the accelerator. Across various challenging benchmarks with irregular loops, COFFA achieves significant performance and energy efficiency improvements over an in-order, an out-of-order RISC-V CPUs, and a recent FPGA, respectively. Moreover, compared with the state-of-the-art CGRA UE-CGRA and Hycube, COFFA can achieve 2.5$\times$ and 3.5$\times$ performance gains, respectively.

Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) is a competitive accelerator architecture for computation-intensive loop kernels. Spatial CGRA is a typical CGRA that performs all the operations spatially, demanding high data parallelism. Given the performance limitations of single-bank memory, partitioning original data into multi-bank memory within the spatial CGRA is favored. However, we observe that the mapping result can cause the inter-iteration conflict, thereby invalidating the memory partition scheme. In this paper, we develop a constraint satisfaction problem-based conflict detection approach capable of detecting the conflict in intra- and inter-iterations within a partition scheme. Besides, we formulate access scheduling as a graph coloring problem, which can minimize conflicts and improve performance. Overall, we develop a comprehensive end-to-end framework with architectural and compiler support for efficient data parallelism on the spatial CGRA. Experimental results show that our architecture can achieve 13.79×, 2.35×, and 1.16× average improvement in performance, compared with an in-order RISC-V CPU, a mainstream FPGA, and a state-of-the-art CGRA SoC (FDRA), respectively. Besides, our architecture has 7.72×, 2.44×, and 1.14× average energy efficiency gains against these three architectures. Finally, at the CGRA level, our CGRA can achieve a 1.53× energy efficiency gain over the CASCADE CGRA.

Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA) is a competitive accelerator architecture for computation-intensive loop kernels. Spatial CGRA is a typical CGRA that performs all the operations spatially to reduce reconfiguration costs within a single iteration, demanding high data parallelism. To achieve this goal, one of the main challenges is the loop-carried dependency between memory accesses. Many existing CGRA compilers struggle to precisely analyze the dependency distance, especially when accesses involve complex address patterns. Consequently, these compilers often default to setting the distance to one, based on a worst-case assumption, leading to degraded performance. However, we observe that a precise distance can improve performance significantly, raising the requirement for an efficient distance calculation approach. Another challenge is the performance constraints of single-bank memory, which necessitate the designer partitioning the original data into a multi-bank memory. However, we observe that the mapping result can cause the inter-iteration conflict, thereby invalidating the memory partition scheme. Therefore, an efficient post-mapping conflict detection is required. In this paper, we develop a constraint satisfaction problem (CSP)-based approach for calculating dependency distance and detecting conflicts, which determines the maximum available dependency distance and identifies conflicts within both intra- and inter-iterations. Besides, we formulate access scheduling as a graph coloring problem, which can minimize conflicts and improve performance. Overall, we develop a comprehensive end-to-end framework with architectural and compiler support for efficient data parallelism on spatial CGRA. We conduct extensive experiments to systematically evaluate the impact of different approaches on performance and compilation. Evaluation results show that our architecture can achieve 13.16× and 1.19× (up to 1.68×) average performance improvements compared to a RISC-V CPU and a state-of-the-art CGRA SoC, respectively. Besides, our architecture has 7.38× and 1.18× (up to 1.65×) average energy efficiency gains compared to these two architectures.