2013 Reports

Functioning Hardware from Functional Programs

Edwards, Stephen A.

To provide high performance at practical power levels, tomorrow’s chips will have to consist primarily of application-specific logic that is only powered on when needed. His paper discusses synthesizing such logic from the functional language Haskell. He proposed approach, which consists of rewriting steps that ultimately dismantle the source program into a simple dialect that enables a syntax-directed translation to hardware, enables aggressive parallelization and the synthesis of application-specific distributed memory systems. Transformations include scheduling arithmetic operations onto specific data paths, replacing recursion with iteration, and improving data locality by inlining recursive types. A compiler based on these principles is under development.