Xilinx Snappy Compression and Decompression

Snappy example resides in L2/demos/snappy directory.

Xilinx Snappy compression/decompression is FPGA based implementation of standard Snappy. Xilinx implementation of Snappy application is aimed at achieving high throughput for both compression and decompression. This Xilinx Snappy application is developed and tested on Xilinx Alveo U200. To know more about standard Snappy application please refer https://github.com/snappy/snappy

This application is accelerated using generic hardware architecture for LZ based data compression algorithms.

Results

Resource Utilization

Table below presents resource utilization of Xilinx Snappy compress/decompress kernels with 8 engines for single compute unit. The final Fmax achieved for this design is 299MHz

Flow	LUT	LUTMem	REG	BRAM	URAM
Compress	47K	10.1K	49.6K	48	48
DeCompress	33.7K	14K	43.8K	146	0

Performance Data

Table below presents the best kernel throughput achieved with single compute unit during execution of this application.

Topic	Results
Best Compression Throughput	2.1 GB/s
Best Decompression Throughput	1.8 GB/s
Average Compression Ratio	2.15x (Silesia Benchmark)

Note: Overall throughput can still be increased with multiple compute units.

Software & Hardware

Software: Xilinx Vitis 2020.1
Hardware: xilinx_u200_xdma_201830_2 (Xilinx Alveo U200)

Usage

Build Steps

Emulation flows

make run TARGET=<sw_emu/hw_emu> DEVICE=xilinx_u200_xdma_201830_2

Note: This command compiles for targeted emulation mode and executes the
      application.

Hardware

make all TARGET=hw DEVICE=xilinx_u200_xdma_201830_2

Note: This command compiles for hardware execution. It generates kernel binary ".xclbin" file.
      This file is placed in ./build/xclbin*/ directory under Snappy folder.

Execution Steps

Input Arguments:

      1. To execute single file for compression :  ./build/xil_snappy -sx <compress_decompress xclbin> -c <file_name>
      2. To execute single file for decompression: ./build/xil_snappy -sx <compress_decompress xclbin> -d <file_name.snappy>
      3. To validate various files together:       ./build/xil_snappy -sx <compress_decompress xclbin> -l <files.list>
          3.a. <files.list>: Contains various file names with current path
      4. To execute single file for compression and decompression : ./build/xil_snappy -sx <compress_decompress xclbin> -v <file_name>

 Note: Default arguments are set in Makefile

Help:

      ===============================================================================================
      Usage: application.exe -[-h-c-l-d-sx-v-B-x]

              --help                  -h      Print Help Options   Default: [false]
              --compress              -c      Compress
              --file_list             -l      List of Input Files
              --decompresss           -d      Decompress
              --compress_decompress   -sx     Compress_Decompress binary
              --validate              -v      Single file validate for Compress and Decompress
              --block_size            -B      Compress Block Size [0-64: 1-256: 2-1024: 3-4096] Default: [0]
              --flow                  -x      Validation [0-All: 1-XcXd: 2-XcSd: 3-ScXd]   Default:[1]
      ===============================================================================================