Towards Synthesis-Free JIT Compilation to Commodity FPGAs
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We explore the feasibility of accelerating soft processors by dynamically translating hot segments of code into FPGA circuits. We propose an approach that tackles two key challenges: the prohibitive compile time of standard synthesis tools and the limited run-time reconfigurability of commodity FPGAs. We use traces, or hot straight-line segments of code, as the units of code to translate into FPGA circuits, combined with a pre-synthesized overlay that is tuned for traces. The overlay, referred to as the Virtual Dynamically Reconfigurable (VDR) overlay consists of an array of functional units that are interconnected by a set of programmable switches. The overlay can be rapidly configured by the soft processor at run-time. Our approach avoids traditional synthesis and reduces code-to-circuit translation to the significantly faster mapping of instructions to VDR units. Preliminary evaluation shows that the overlay speeds up the execution of the benchmark by up to 9X over a Nios II processor. The overlay incurs a 6.4X penalty in resources compared to Nios II.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it