\environment fonts_env
\environment lsr_env

\startcomponent pipelining

\chapter[sec:pipelining]{Loop Pipelining}

\startsynopsis
  This section describes the future plans of implementing loop pipelining in Vericert, also called
  loop scheduling.  This addresses the final major issue with Vericert, which is efficiently
  handling loops.
\stopsynopsis

Standard instruction scheduling only addresses parallelisation inside hyperblocks, which are linear
sections of code.  However, loops are often the most critical sections in code, and scheduling only
addresses parallelisation within one iteration.  Traditionally, loop pipelining is performed as part
of the normal scheduling step in \HLS, as the scheduling algorithm can be generalised to support
these new constraints.  However, it becomes expensive to check the correctness of a scheduling
algorithm that transforms the code in this many ways.  It is better to separate loop pipelining into
it's own translation pass which does a source-to-source translation of the code.  The final result
should be similar to performing the loop pipelining together with the scheduling.

\section{Loop pipelining example}

\startplacemarginfigure[location=here,reference={fig:pipelined-loop},title={Example of pipelining a
    loop.}]
  \startfloatcombination[nx=2]

    \startplacesubfigure[title={Simple loop containing an accumulation of values with an
        inter-iteration dependency.}]
      \startframedtext[frame=off,offset=none,width={0.6\textwidth}]
        \starthlC
          for (int i = 1; i < N; i++) {
              c1 = acc[i-1] * c;
              c2 = x[i] * y[i];
              acc[i] = c1 + c2;
          }
        \stophlC
      \stopframedtext
    \stopplacesubfigure

    \startplacesubfigure[title={Pipelined loop reducing the number of dependencies inside of the
        loop.}]
      \startframedtext[frame=off,offset=none,width={0.6\textwidth}]
        \starthlC
          c1 = acc[0] * c;
          c2 = x[1] * y[1];
          for (int i = 1; i < N-1; i++) {
              acc[i] = c1 + c2;
              c2 = x[i+1] * y[i+1];
              c1 = acc[i+1] * c;
          }
          acc[N-1] = c1 + c2;
        \stophlC
      \stopframedtext
    \stopplacesubfigure

  \stopfloatcombination
\stopplacemarginfigure

\in{Figure}[fig:pipelined-loop] shows an example of \emph{software pipelining} of a loop which
accumulates values and modifies an array.  In \in{Figure}{a}[fig:pipelined-loop], the body of the
loop cannot be scheduled in less than three cycles, assuming that a load takes two clock cycles.
However, after transforming the code into the pipelined version in
\in{Figure}{b}[fig:pipelined-loop], the number of inter-iteration dependencies have been reduced, by
moving the store into the next iteration of the loop.  This means that the body of the loop could
now be scheduled in two clock cycles.

The process of pipelining the loop by being resource constrained can be performed using iterative
modulo scheduling~\cite[rau94_iterat_sched], followed by modulo variable
expansion~\cite[lam88_softw_pipel].  The steps performed in the optimisation are the following.

\startitemize[n]
\item Calculate a minimum \II, which is the lowest possible \II\ based on the resources of the code
  inside of the loop and the distance and delay of inter-iteration dependencies.
\item Perform modulo scheduling with an increasing \II\ until one is found that works.  The
  scheduling is performed by adding instructions to a \MRT~\cite[lam88_softw_pipel], assigning
  operations to each resource for one iteration.
\item Once a valid modulo schedule is found, the loop code can be generated from it.  To keep the
  \II\ that was found in the previous step, modulo variable expansion might be necessary and require
  unrolling the loop.
\stopitemize

\section{Verification of pipelining}

Verification of pipelining has already been performed in CompCert by
\cite[authoryears][tristan10_simpl_verif_valid_softw_pipel].  Assuming that one has a loop body
$\mathcal{B}$, the pipelined code can be described using the prologue $\mathcal{P}$, the steady
state $\mathcal{S}$, the epilogue $\mathcal{E}$, and finally some additional variables representing
the minimum number of iterations that need to be performed to be able to use the pipelined loop
$\mu$ and representing the unroll factor of the steady state $\delta$.

The goal is to verify the equivalence of the original loop and the pipelined loop using a validation
algorithm, and then prove that the validation algorithm is \emph{sound}, i.e. if it finds the two
loops to be equivalent, this implies that they will behave the same according to the language
semantics.  Essentially, as the loop pipelining algorithm only modifies loops, it is enough to show
that the input loop $X$ is equivalent to the pipelined version of the loop $Y$.  Assuming that the
validation algorithm is called $\alpha$, we therefore want to show that the following statement
holds, where $X_N$ means that we are considering $N$ iterations of the loop.
\placeformula\startformula
  \forall N,\quad \alpha(X_N) = \startmathcases
    \NC \alpha(Y_{N/\delta}; X_{N\%\delta}) \NC N \ge \mu \NR
    \NC \alpha(X_N) \NC \text{otherwise} \NR
\stopmathcases\stopformula

This states that for any number of iteration of the loop X, the formula should hold.  As the number
of loop iterations $N$ are not always known at compile time, this may become an infinite property
that needs to be checked.

\startmode[section]
  \section{Bibliography}
  \placelistofpublications
\stopmode

\stopcomponent
