Sharc Lab @ Georgia Tech

Software/Hardware Co-Design for Intelligence and Efficiency

Materials

Sharc-lab Github is where we maintain our open-source code

Sharc-lab Knowledge Pool is where we collect and record our knowledge (especially HLS) and research experiences at Sharc.

Tutorials

FPGA and HLS

  • How to use Vitis (Vivado) HLS tool for FPGA:
    • Vivado HLS Technical Introduction​
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ2RGwLmXc0
    • This is a very beginner-friendly document:
      • https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2020_1/ug871-vivado-high-level-synthesis-tutorial.pdf
  • Other useful Resources from Xilinx:
    • https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/xilinx2020_1/ug902-vivado-high-level-synthesis.pdf
    • https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/sw_manuals/ug998-vivado-intro-fpga-design-hls.pdf
    • https://github.com/Xilinx/HLS-Tiny-Tutorialshttps://xilinx.github.io/Vitis_Accel_Examples/master/html/cpp.html
    • https://www.xilinx.com/html_docs/xilinx2020_2/vitis_doc/hls_pragmas.html
  • (Recommended) A tutorial about parallel programming for FPGA with High-Level Synthesis
  • A book about practical parallel programming for FPGA using HLS
    • https://arxiv.org/pdf/1805.03648.pdf
  • Helpful examples of HLS programming on FPGA
    • DAC-SDC 2021 competition top-3 winner designs
      • ​https://github.com/jgoeders/dac_sdc_2020_designs
    • DAC-SDC 2020 competition top-1 winner designs (with clear execution instructions)
      • ​https://github.com/TomG008/SkyNet
    • Vitis-AI examples (Xilinx official github)
      • ​https://github.com/Xilinx/Vitis-AI

Graph Neural Networks and other NNs

  • (Beginner) A brief and high-level introduction to GNN
    • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fOctJB4kVlM&t=9s
  • (Beginner) A nice blog introducing GNN: https://distill.pub/2021/gnn-intro/
  • (Advanced) Introductory Course
    • Stanford CS224W by Prof. Jure Leskovec
    • Link: http://web.stanford.edu/class/cs224w/
  • Must-read GNN papers
    • ​​​​https://github.com/thunlp/GNNPapers
  • CNN/RNN Tutorials
    • https://stanford.edu/~shervine/teaching/cs-230/cheatsheet-convolutional-neural-networks
  • Datasets
    • Quantum chemistry: ​https://www.kaggle.com/zaharch/quantum-machine-9-aka-qm9
    • Open graph benchmark (OGB): https://ogb.stanford.edu/
    • Large-scale ML graph competition: https://ogb.stanford.edu/kddcup2021/
    • https://ls11-www.cs.tu-dortmund.de/staff/morris/graphkerneldatasets

Advice on Ph.D.

Article Writing

How to write…

Always check first if you’re not sure:

Grammar mistakes ever made by Callie:

  • “denoted by” or “denoted as”?
    • 67,800 results​ of “denoted by” against 18,300 results of “denoted as” in Google Scholar.
    • “This parameter is denoted by P”, or “Let P denote this parameter”.
  • “a, b and c” or “a, b, and c”?​​​ [ref1] [ref2]
    • 1) The 3000$ will be split between you, Callie and Pan.
    • 2) The 3000$ will be split between you, Callie, and Pan.
    • How much money will you get?
  • “which” or “that”? [ref]
    • In a defining clause, use “that”; in non-defining clauses, use “which”.
    • Remember, “which” is as disposable as a sandwich bag. If you can remove the clause without destroying the meaning of the sentence, the clause is nonessential and you can use “which”.
  • “a same” or “the same”? [ref]
    • You and I have the same problem: bad English writing.
    • You and I have a common problem: bad English writing.
  • “as follows” is the only correct phrase [ref]
    • “As follows” is always the correct form, even for an enumeration of many things. The expression is elliptical for “as it follows—not “as they follow”.
    • These are incorrect (which were mistakenly used by Callie): as following, as the following, etc.
  • “thus” is an adverb, not a conjunction
    • × Wrong:  No one showed up, thus the class was canceled.​ (Interestingly, this wrong example is found on a dictionary website [ref]…)
    • √ Right: No one showed up and thus the class was canceled.​
    • Also pay attention to other adverbs!
  • “independent of” or “independent from” [ref]
    • X is independent of​ y.
  • About references in an article [ref] [ref]
    • Using a citation reference like a word is an extremely bad style; always use the work’s name or author(s)’ name
    • 1-2 Authors: name1 and name2
    • 3 or more authors: name et al.
      • Pay attention to the punctuation

Related Conferences/Journals

Electronic Design Automation

  • Design Automation Conference (DAC)
    • Submission in late November, conference in June/July
  • International Conference On Computer-Aided Design (ICCAD)
    • Submission in late May, conference in November
  • Design, Automation and Test in Europe Conference (DATE)
    • Submission in late September, conference in March
  • Asia and South Pacific Design Automation Conference (ASP-DAC)
    • Submission in late September, conference in late July, conference in January
  • Great Lakes Symposium on VLSI (GLSVLSI)
    • Submission in January, conference in June

Reconfigurable/Parallel Computing

  • ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA)
    • Submission in September, conference in February/March
  • IEEE Symposium on Field-Programmable Custom Computing Machines (FCCM)
    • Submission in January, conference in May
  • International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL)
    • Submission in March, conference in September
  • ACM SIGSIM Conference on Principles of Advanced Discrete Simulation (PADS)
    • Submission in March, conference in June
  • SIAM Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing (PP)
    • Submission in September, conference in February
  • IEEE International Conference on Application-specific Systems, Architectures and Processors (ASAP)
    • Submission in February, conference in July
  • Embedded Systems Week (ESWEEK), including:
    • International Conference on Compilers, Architectures, and Synthesis for Embedded Systems (CASES)
    • International Conference on Hardware/Software Codesign and System Synthesis (CODES+ISSS)
    • International Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT)
    • Submission in April, conference in October
  • ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference (SC)
    • Submission in late March, conference in November
  • IEEE International Parallel & Distributed Processing Symposium (IPDPS)
    • Submission in October, conference in May/June

Computer Architecture

  • IEEE/ACM International Symposium on Microarchitecture (MICRO)
    • Submission in April, conference in October
  • International Symposium on Computer Architecture (ISCA)
    • Submission in November, conference in June
  • International Symposium on High-Performance Computer Architecture (HPCA)
    • Submission in July, conference in February
  • ACM Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS)
    • Spring cycle: March
    • Summer cycle: June
    • Fall cycle: October
    • Conference: March

HPC

Here is an almost full list of HPC-related conferences: https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/hpc-announce/

Machine Learning and Deep Learning

  • International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR)
    • Submission in October, conference in April
  • Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)
    • Submission in November, conference in June
  • International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML)
    • Submission in January, conference in July
  • Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS)
    • Submission in May, conference in November
  • International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV)
    • Submission in March, conference in October
  • European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV)
    • Submission in March, conference in October

Here is an almost full list of ML conferences:
AISTATS, ALT, COLT, ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS, UAI, ECML, CIKM, ICDM, KDD, SIGIR, WSDM, WWW, AAAI, IJCAI, CVPR, ECCV, ICCV, SIGGRAPH, BMVC, ACL, EMNLP, ICASSP, INTERSPEECH, NAACL, ICRA, IROS, RSS, CORL, AAMAS, HRI, ICAPS, EC, HCOMP, ICWSM, IUI, KR, SAT, CPAIOR, ECAI

Journals

  1. IEEE Transactions on Computer-Aided Design of Integrated Circuits and Systems (TCAD)
  2. IEEE IEEE Transactions on Very Large Scale Integration (VLSI) Systems (TVLSI)
  3. IEEE Transactions on Computers (TC)
  4. ACM Transactions on Design Automation of Electronic Systems (TODES)

Good Books