Temporal Data Parallelism: Host-to-Kernel Dataflow - 2021.1 English

Vitis Unified Software Platform Documentation: Application Acceleration Development (UG1393)

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-03-29
Version
2021.1 English

Sometimes, the data processed by a compute unit passes from one stage of processing in the kernel, to the next stage of processing. In this case, the first stage of the kernel may be free to begin processing a new set of data. In essence, like a factory assembly line, the kernel can accept new data while the original data moves down the line.

To understand this approach, assume a kernel has only one CU on the FPGA, and the host application enqueues the kernel multiple times with different sets of data. As shown in Using Host Pointer Buffers, the host application can migrate data to the device global memory ahead of the kernel execution, thus hiding the data transfer latency by the kernel execution, enabling software pipelining.

However, by default, a kernel can only start processing a new set of data only when it has finished processing the current set of data. Although clEnqueueMigrateMemObject hides the data transfer time, multiple kernel executions still remain sequential.

By enabling host-to-kernel dataflow, it is possible to further improve the performance of the accelerator by restarting the kernel with a new set of data while the kernel is still processing the previous set of data. As discussed in Enabling Host-to-Kernel Dataflow, the kernel must implement the ap_ctrl_chain interface, and must be written to permit processing data in stages. In this case, XRT restarts the kernel as soon as it is able to accept new data, thus overlapping multiple kernel executions. However, the host program must keep the command queue filled with requests so that the kernel can restart as soon as it is ready to accept new data.

The following is a conceptual diagram for host-to-kernel dataflow.

Figure 1. Host to Kernel Dataflow

The longer the kernel takes to process a set of data from start to finish, the greater the opportunity to use host-to-kernel dataflow to improve performance. Rather than waiting until the kernel has finished processing one set of data, simply wait until the kernel is ready to begin processing the next set of data. This allows temporal parallelism, where different stages of the same kernel processes a different set of data from multiple clEnqueueTask commands, in a pipelined manner.

For advanced designs, you can effectively use both the spatial parallelism with multiple CUs to process data, combined with temporal parallelism using host-to-kernel dataflow, overlapping kernel executions on each compute unit.

Important: Embedded processor platforms do not support the host-to-kernel dataflow feature.