Tutorial on hardware programming with Seashell

This tutorial is targeted to introduce hardware programming in high-level languages to C programmers or hardware programmers interested in moving into high level synthesis. This tutorial will use: * Seashell, which is a type overlay to ensure hardware safety of your program and porgram synthesis to C/C++ * Buildbot, which is infrastructure created to submit a seashell program and receive hardware results

Buildbot itself hides away some other tools that can be replaced with different tools, * Vivado HLS, which is a C/C++ to Verilog/VHDL translator on top of Vivado synthesis tool flow * Xilinx Zedboard SoC development board, which has an arm CPU and a Zync FPGA with memory and interconnections which have some configurability

Prerequisites

• Basic knowledge on C/C++
• Some means to create files, zip them and submit them to Buildbot to run externally or a backend with seac compiler, HLS and a CPU-FPGA heterogeneous platform to run locally.

We’ll be going through the following examples to get familiarized with the tools and to use the infrastructure to create interesting programs.

1. vector-vector add on host processor
   • Run a program on heterogeneous platform host processor
2. vector-vector add on reconfigurable hardware controlled by the host processor
   • Design and interface hardware module in Buildbot, Familiarize with Seashell, Run a CPU-FPGA program on a heterogeneous platform
3. optimized vector-vector add on reconfigurable hardware controlled by the host processor
   • Introduce to commonly used hardware optimizations, array partition, loop unroll and pipelining
4. matrix multiplication
   • Usage and optimization of nested loops, Using local variables,
5. convolution
   • Data transfer methods, Using memory,