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Sextans

Sextans is an accelerator for general-purpose Sparse-Matrix Dense-Matrix Multiplication (SpMM). One exciting feature is that we only need to prototype Sextans once, and the hardware supports an arbitrary SpMM. Following are software and hardware dependencies.

TAPA + Autobridge, Gurobi
Xilinx Vitis 2021.2
Alveo U280 HBM FPGA

Dependencies:

TAPA + Autobridge

Following Install TAPA to install TAPA(Autobridge) and Gurobi.
Vitis 2021.2
Xilinx xilinx_u280_xdma_201920_3 shell and a Xilinx U280 FPGA card.

Input matrix format & sample input

The host code takes martrix market format(https://math.nist.gov/MatrixMarket/formats.html). We test on sparse matrices from SuiteSparse(https://sparse.tamu.edu) collection. We have two example matices under the folder matrices

To do software emulation:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake ..
make swsim

if you encounter cmake errors, just run the following under build

g++ -o sextans -Wno-write-strings -Wunused-result -O2 ../src/sextans.cpp ../src/sextans-host.cpp -ltapa -lfrt -lglog -lgflags -lOpenCL

To run an example matrix(software emulation), run

./sextans ../matrices/nasa4704/nasa4704.mtx 16

To run HLS:

cd build
cp ../bitstream/run_tapa.sh ./
sh run_tapa.sh

After HLS, a bitstream generator file Sextans_generate_bitstream.sh is generated under the build folder. Note that we leverages the DSE optition from Autobridge for better Place and Route. We use run-6 to generate hardware.

To generate bitstream (hardware):

sh Sextans_generate_bitstream.sh

To run the accelerator on board:

We provide the generated bitstream. If you have a U280 FPGA ready, you don't need to generate the hwardware again, just run

TAPAB=../bitstream/Sextans_xilinx_u280_xdma_201920_3.xclbin ./sextans ../matrices/nasa4704/nasa4704.mtx 16

To learn more about the techinqual details, please see this link.

If you find this code useful, please cite:

@inproceedings{song2022sextans,
    author = {Linghao Song and Yuze Chi and Atefeh Sohrabizadeh and Young-kyu Choi and Jason Lau and Jason Cong},
    title = {Sextans: A Streaming Accelerator for General-Purpose Sparse-Matrix Dense-Matrix Multiplication},
    booktitle={Proceedings of the 2022 ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays},
    pages={65--77},
    year = {2022}
}