Eliminate I/O Contentions - 2021.2 English

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

Document ID
UG1393
Release Date
2022-03-29
Version
2021.2 English

I/O contentions appear when a given I/O port of internal memory resources must be accessed more than once per loop iteration. A loop cannot be pipelined with an II lower than the number of times an I/O resource is accessed per loop iteration. If port A must be accessed four times in a loop iteration, then the lowest possible II will be 4 in single-port RAM.

The developer needs to assess whether these I/O accesses are necessary or if they can be eliminated. The most common techniques for reducing I/O contentions are:

  • Creating internal cache structures

    If some of the problematic I/O accesses involve accessing data already accessed in prior loop iterations, then a possibility is to modify the code to make local copies of the values accessed in those earlier iterations. Maintaining a local data cache can help reduce the need for external I/O accesses, thereby improving the potential II of the loop.

    This example on the Vitis Accel Examples GitHub repository illustrates how a shift register can be used locally, cache previously read values, and improve the throughput of a filter.

  • Reconfiguring I/Os and memories

    As explained earlier in the section about improving latency, the HLS compiler maps arrays to memories, and the default memory configuration can not offer sufficient bandwidth for the required throughput. The array partitioning and reshaping pragmas can also be used in this context to create memory structure with higher bandwidth, thereby improving the potential II of the loop.