Accelerators implemented on reconfigurable hardware and, in particular, on Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), are experiencing a renewed interest in the hardware design community. The ability to finely customize the design of the accelerators to the applications can provide interesting benefits in terms of efficiency with respect to fixed accelerators, especially for data-intensive applications. However, FPGAs have traditionally been programmed with hardware description languages, requiring significant engineering efforts and long development times. The availability of new tools to generate accelerators starting from high-level specifications provides easier access to FPGAs and preserve programmer productivity.
This talk presents Bambu, an open-source framework for research in high-level synthesis (http://panda.dei.polimi.it/?page_id=81). It leverages existing software compilers (GCC and CLANG/LLVM) to automatically generate FPGA-based accelerators directly from C/C++ language.

The NECSTLab is a DEIB laboratory, with different research lines on advanced topics in computing systems: from architectural characteristics, to hardware-software codesign methodologies, to security and dependability issues of complex system architectures. 

Every week, the "NECST Friday Talk" invites researchers, professionals or entrepreneurs to share their work experiences and projects they are implementing in the "Computing Systems".