The Vitis data analytics library targets to help data analysis developers to accelerate analysis execution. It provides three layers of APIs, namely L1/L2/L3. Each tackles different parts of the whole processing.
- L3 provides pure software APIs for:
- Define data structures to describe input/output/ operation types and parameters.
- Provide combination of operations for acceleration. These combinations are commonly used and easy to fit into the whole execution plan (decompress + parser + filter + format output).
- Schedule jobs, distributing sub jobs among all FPGA cards, pipeline data transfers, and kernel executions.
- L2 APIs are kernels running on FPGA cards. Each time called, they will finish certain processing according to input configs. L2 APIs are combinations of multiple processing units with each unit consisting of multiple processing stages. In this way, kernels could both processing multiple data at the same time and apply multiple operations to the same data. L2 API design subject to resource constraints and will differ according to FPGA cards.
- L1 APIs are basic operators in processing, like csv parser. They’re all highly optimize HLS design, providing optimal performance. They’re all template design, make them easier to scale and fit into different resource constraint.