Overlap Host and Kernel

This examples demonstrates techniques that allow user to overlap Host(CPU) and FPGA computation in an application. It will cover asynchronous operations and event object.

KEY CONCEPTS: OpenCL Host API, Synchronize Host and FPGA, Asynchronous Processing, Events, Asynchronous memcpy

KEYWORDS: cl_event, cl::CommandQueue, CL_QUEUE_OUT_OF_ORDER_EXEC_MODE_ENABLE, enqueueMigrateMemObjects

This example illustrates how host read and write tasks can be synchronized with kernel computational tasks to achieve low latency in cases where data is too large to fit on FPGA or it is being streamed from a sensor or a network.

For example, the data is too big to fit in an FPGA or the data is being streamed from a sensor or the network. In these situations data must be transferred to the host memory to the FPGA before the computation can be performed. Because PCIe is an full-duplex interconnect, you can transfer data to and from the FPGA simultaneously. Xilinx FPGAs can also perform computations during these data transfers. Performing all three of these operations at the same time allows to keep the FPGA busy and take full advantage of all of the hardware on your system.

In this example, it is described how to perform this using an out of order command queue.

Many OpenCL commands are asynchronous. This means that whenever you call an OpenCL function, the function will return before the operation has completed. Asynchronous nature of OpenCL allows you to simultaneously perform tasks on the host CPU as well as the FPGA.

Memory transfer operations are asynchronous when the blocking_read, blocking_write parameters are set to CL_FALSE. These operations are behaving on host memory so it is important to make sure that the command has completed before that memory is used.

You can make sure an operation has completed by querying events returned by these commands. Events are OpenCL objects that track the status of operations. Event objects are created by kernel execution commands, read, write, copy commands on memory objects or user events created using clCreateUserEvent.

Events can be used to synchronize operations between the host thread and the device or between two operations in the same context. You can also use events to time a particular operation if the command queue was created using the CL_QUEUE_PROFILING_ENABLE flag.

Most enqueuing commands return events by accepting a cl::Event pointer as their last argument of the call. These events can be queried using the cl::Event::wait() function to get the status of a particular operation.

Many functions also accept event lists that can be used to enforce ordering in an OpenCL context. These events lists are especially important in the context of out of order command queues as they are the only way specify dependency. Normal in-order command queues do not need this because dependency is enforced in the order the operation was enqueued.

EXCLUDED PLATFORMS:

• All NoDMA Platforms, i.e u50 nodma etc

DESIGN FILES

Application code is located in the src directory. Accelerator binary files will be compiled to the xclbin directory. The xclbin directory is required by the Makefile and its contents will be filled during compilation. A listing of all the files in this example is shown below

src/host.cpp
src/vector_addition.cpp

Access these files in the github repo by clicking here.

COMMAND LINE ARGUMENTS

Once the environment has been configured, the application can be executed by

./overlap <vector_addition XCLBIN>