Phism: Polyhedral High-Level Synthesis in MLIR

Abstract

Polyhedral optimisation, a methodology that views nested loops as polyhedra and searches for their optimal transformation regarding specific objectives (parallelism, locality, etc.), sounds promising for mitigating difficulties in automatically optimising hardware designs described by high-level synthesis (HLS), which are typically software programs with nested loops. Nevertheless, existing polyhedral tools cannot meet the requirements from HLS developers for platform-specific customisation and software/hardware co-optimisation. This paper proposes $\phi_{sm}$ (phism), a polyhedral HLS framework built on MLIR, to address these challenges through progressive lowering multi-level intermediate representations (IRs) from polyhedra to HLS designs.