S2FA: an accelerator automation framework for heterogeneous computing in datacenters

Cody Hao Yu, Peng Wei, Max Grossman, Peng Zhang, Vivek Sarkar, Jason Cong

Abstract: Big data analytics using the JVM-based MapReduce framework has become a popular approach to address the explosive growth of data sizes. Adopting FPGAs in datacenters as accelerators to improve performance and energy efficiency also attracts increasing attention. However, the integration of FPGAs into such JVM-based frameworks raises the challenge of poor programmability. Programmers must not only rewrite Java/Scala programs to C/C++ or OpenCL, but, to achieve high performance, they must also take into consideration the intricacies of FPGAs. To address this challenge, we present S2FA (Spark-to-FPGA-Accelerator), an automation framework that generates FPGA accelerator designs from Apache Spark programs written in Scala. S2FA bridges the semantic gap between object-oriented languages and HLS C while achieving high performance using learning-based design space exploration. Evaluation results show that our generated FPGA designs achieve up to 49.9× performance improvement for several machine learning applications compared to their corresponding implementations on the JVM.