Mitrion 2.0 - Increased Productivity for All Mitrion-C Developers

With the release of Mitrion 2.0, the Mitrion SDK has gone through a major overhaul, focusing on increased productivity for Mitrion-C programmers. There are a lot of changes made under the hood that programmers will notice in radically shorter compile times, reduced memory requirements when working on larger projects, and a faster Mitrion-C simulator.

 

New Productivity Features for the Mitrion-C Simulator


The Mitrion-C Simulator is key to productivity when developing accelerated applications for FPGAs. In the Mitrion 2.0 release, new features give programmers better overview and faster access to critical information:

  • New node information pop-ups link the nodes in the data dependency graph to the Mitrion-C source code, making it easy to correlate Mitrion-C statements with their resulting graph nodes.
  • The graphical user interface can now be used to simulate the Mitrion-C program after the compiler has performed optimizations. This gives an accurate and visual impression of the performance of the Mitrion-C program executing on the Mitrion Virtual Processor on a FPGA and makes it easier to locate and eliminate performance bottlenecks.
  • FPGA resource usage information is now available at a glance for each node in the data dependency graph. This allows programmers to quickly determine where resources are used, and to make informed decisions on how to make changes to optimize performance.


 

 

Improved Automatic Deadlock Resolution

 

The deadlock resolution has been overhauled in order to automatically resolve deadlock situations not detected previously. The FPGA resource usage for deadlock resolution has also been greatly reduced, allowing better performance from the Mitrion Virtual Processor.


Much Improved Support for the Stream Data Type


In Mitrion-C 2.0, the stream data type can now be used in most places where the list data type can be used. In contrast to a list, the length of a stream can be unknown at compile time allowing Mitrion-C programs to operate on dynamic datasets. Streams are now also fully supported by the Mithal API, eliminating the need to master vendor specific APIs to access stream functionality on FPGA systems that support stream input and output.

 

Streamlined Synthesis and Place & Route Process

 

The new Mitrion SPR tool is automatically invoked when using the Mitrion SDK to configure a Mitrion Virtual Processor. The SPR tool runs the FPGA vendor synthesis and place & route software without user intervention, eliminating the need for programmers to learn how to use these tools.

 

In addition to the productivity enhancements, the Mitrion SDK 2.0 adds support for state-of-the-art in-socket accelerators provided through Mitrionics Hybrid Computing servers. These in-socket accelerators are connected directly to a CPU socket and deliver tight integration to the host system.

 

For a complete list of changes, see the Mitrion SDK Release Notes.