Is It a Good Idea to Build an HLS Tool on Top of MLIR?

Jiahui Xu from the DYNAMO research group at ETH Zurich is joining us to talk about their work on the HLS compiler Dynamatic targeting FPGAs. As usual there will be pizza, snacks, beer, and soft drinks after the event for participants, sponsored by NVIDIA. Title: Is It a Good Idea to Build an HLS Tool on Top of MLIR? Experience from Building the Dynamatic HLS Compiler Abstract: When the MLIR project was first introduced, it promised to address the issues that the HLS community had with the LLVM project. But is this really the case, and is MLIR the "right"/"best" compiler infrastructure for HLS? In this talk, we will share our experience from 8 years of active development of Dynamatic — an MLIR-based HLS compiler developed at EPFL and ETH Zurich. We will discuss Dynamatic's architecture, its dialect design, and the specific MLIR features that lead to fragile workarounds when implementing HLS features. We look forward to discussing the lessons learned and the future development of MLIR-based HLS projects with the MLIR community. Location: The event takes place in room D1.1 in the HG building of ETH Zurich's central campus.