HLSPredict: Cross Platform Performance Prediction for FPGA High-Level Synthesis

FPGA application developers must explore increasingly large design spaces to identify regions of code to accelerate. High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools automatically derive FPGA-based designs from high-level language specifications, which improves designer productivity; however, HLS tool run-times are cost-prohibitive for design space exploration, preventing designers from adequately answering cost-value decisions without expert guidance. To address this concern, this paper introduces a machine learning framework to predict FPGA performance and power consumption without relying on analytical models or HLS tools in-the-loop. For workloads that were manually optimized by appropriately setting pragmas, the framework obtains a worst-case relative error of 9.08% while running 43.78x faster than HLS; for unoptimized workloads, the framework obtains a worst-case relative error of 9.79% while running 36.24x faster than HLS.