Hybridthreads Compiler: Generation of Application Specific Hardware Thread Cores from C

The hthreads group is developing the hybridthreads compiler (HTC) to satisfy the need for a C compiler that can generate hardware threads. Compiling C-like languages to hardware has been studied a number of times. The goal of past projects is different than the goal of HTC because past projects focused on creating and optimizing hardware based co-processors that interleave execution of a single thread with the CPU. Our goal is to compile unmodified C into hardware threads that can run without depending on the CPU, gaining our speedup from physical thread-level parallelism (TLP). We are not attempting to use C as a general-purpose hardware description language. Instead, we use the FPGA with hthreads as just another compiler target architecture.