Streaming Data Paradigm - 2024.1 English

Vitis High-Level Synthesis User Guide (UG1399)

Document ID
UG1399
Release Date
2024-07-03
Version
2024.1 English

A stream is an important abstraction: it represents an unbounded, continuously updating data set, where unbounded means “of unknown or of unlimited size.” A stream can be a sequence of data (scalars or buffers) flowing unidirectionally between a source (producer) process and a destination (consumer) process. The streaming paradigm forces you to think in terms of data access patterns (or sequences). In software, random memory accesses to data are virtually free (ignoring the caching costs), but in hardware, it is really advantageous to make sequential accesses, which can be converted into streams. Decomposing your algorithm into producer-consumer relationships that communicate by streaming data through the network has several advantages. It lets the programmer define the algorithm in a sequential manner and the parallelism is extracted through other means (such as by the compiler). Complexities like synchronization between the tasks etc are abstracted away. It allows the producer and the consumer tasks to process data simultaneously, which is key for achieving higher throughput. Another benefit is cleaner and simpler code.

As was mentioned before, in the case of the producer and consumer paradigm, the data transfer pattern strongly maps to a FIFO or a PIPO buffer implementation. A FIFO buffer is simply a queue with a predetermined size/depth where the first element that gets inserted into the queue also becomes the first element that can be popped from the queue. The main advantage of using a FIFO buffer is that the consumer process can start accessing the data inside the FIFO buffer as soon as the producer inserts the data into the buffer. The only issue with using FIFO buffers is that due to varying rates of production/consumption between the producers and consumers, it is possible for improperly sized FIFO buffers to cause a deadlock. This typically happens in a design that has several producers and consumers. A Ping Pong Buffer is a double buffer that is used to speed up a process that can overlap the I/O operation with the data processing operation. One buffer is used to hold a block of data so that a consumer process sees a complete (but old) version of the data, while in the other buffer a producer process is creating a new (partial) version of data. When the new block of data is complete and valid, the consumer and the producer processes alternates access to the two buffers. As a result, the usage of a ping-pong buffer increases the overall throughput of a device and helps to prevent eventual bottlenecks. The key advantage of PIPOs is that the tool automatically matches the rate of production vs the rate of consumption and creates a channel of communication that is both high performance and is deadlock free. It is important to note here that regardless of whether FIFOs/PIPOs are used, the key characteristic is the same: the producer sends or streams a block of data to the consumer. A block of data can be a single value or a group of N values. The bigger the block size, the more memory resources are needed.

The following is a simple sum application to illustrate the classic streaming/dataflow network. In this case, the goal of the application is to pair-wise add a stream of random numbers then print them. The first two tasks (Task 1 and 2) provide a stream of random numbers to add. These are sent over a FIFO channel to the sum task (Task 3) which reads the values from the FIFO channels. The sum task then sends the output to the print task (Task 4) to publish the result. The FIFO channels provide asynchronous buffering between these independent threads of execution.

Figure 1. Streaming/Dataflow Network

The streams that connect each “task” are usually implemented as FIFO queues. The FIFO abstracts away the parallel behavior from the programmer, leaving them to reason about a “snapshot” of time when the task is active (scheduled). FIFOs make parallelization easier to implement. This largely results from the reduced variable space that programmers must contend with when implementing parallelization frameworks or fault-tolerant solutions. The FIFO between two independent kernels (see example above) exhibits classic queueing behavior. With purely streaming systems, these can be modeled using queueing or network flow models. Another big advantage of this dataflow type network and streaming optimization is that it can be applied at different levels of granularity. A programmer can design such a network inside each task and for a system of tasks or kernel. In fact, you can have a streaming network that instantiates and connects multiple streaming networks or tasks, hierarchically. Another optimization that allows for finer-grained parallelism is pipelining.