Hardware-assisted simulated annealing with application for fast FPGA placement
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To truly exploit FPGAs for rapid turn-around development and prototyping, placement times must be reduced to seconds; late-bound, reconfigurable computing applications may demand placement times as short as microseconds. In this paper, we show how a systolic structure can accelerate placement by assigning one processing element to each possible location for an FPGA LUT from a design netlist. We demonstrate that our technique approaches the same quality point as traditional simulated annealing as measured by a simple linear wirelength metric. Experimental results look ahead to compare quality against VPR's fast placer when considering the minimum channel width required to route as the primary optimization criteria. Preliminary results from an FPGA implementation show the feasibility of accelerating simulated annealing by three orders of magnitude using this approach. This means we can place the largest design in the University of Toronto's "FPGA Placement and Routing Challenge" in around 4ms.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".