CAOS: CAD as an Adaptive Open-Platform Service for High Performance Reconfigurable Systems

The increasing demand for computing power in fields such as genomics, image processing and machine learning is pushing towards hardware specialization and heterogeneous systems in order to keep up with the required performance level at sustainable power consumption. Among the available solutions, Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), thanks to their advancements, currently represent a very promising candidate, offering a compelling trade-off between efficiency and flexibility. Despite the potential benefits of reconfigurable hardware, one of the main limiting factor to the widespread adoption of FPGAs is complexity in programmability, as well as the effort required to port software solutions to efficient hardware-software implementations. In this chapter, we present CAD as an Adaptive Open-platform Service (CAOS), a platform to guide the application developer in the implementation of efficient hardware-software solutions for high performance reconfigurable systems. The platform assists the designer from the high-level analysis of the code, towards the optimization and implementation of the functionalities to be accelerated on the reconfigurable nodes. Finally, CAOS is designed to facilitate the integration of external contributions and to foster research on Computer Aided Design (CAD) tools for accelerating software applications on FPGA-based systems.