Accelerating OCaml Programs on FPGA

This paper aims to exploit the massive parallelism of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) by programming them in OCaml, a multiparadigm and statically typed language. It first presents O2B, an implementation of the OCaml virtual machine using a softcore processor to run the entire OCaml language on an FPGA. It then introduces Macle, a language to express, in ML-style, hardware-accelerated user-defined functions, implemented as gates and registers on the same FPGA. Macle allows to implement pure computations and compose them in parallel. It also supports processing of dynamic data structures such as arrays, matrices and trees allocated by the OCaml runtime in the memory of the softcore processor. Macle functions can then be called, as hardware accelerators, by OCaml programs executed by O2B. This combination of Macle and OCaml codes in a single source program enables to easily prototype FPGA applications mixing numeric and symbolic computations.