Transparent FPGA flow

In this demo we propose an automated flow that allows the transparent execution of ordinary code on a heterogeneous platform including an FPGA. Our solution requires no change in the code, not even pragma indications to guide the optimization, and dynamically adapts its behaviour to the available data and the workload of the system. Thus, the developer does not need to be aware of the target platform details, nor she has to forecast usage patterns to prevent performance bottlenecks, as the system transparently identifies parallelizable, computationally-intensive code fragments and dispatches them to a data flow overlay architecture built on top of the FPGA. Since the bitstream we use is fixed, and contrary to HLS, we can alter the functionalities offered by the FPGA on-the-fly to adapt them to current usage. Finally, since we operate at the LLVM's Intermediate Representation (IR) level, our approach is language-agnostic.