Exploring pipe implementations using an OpenCL framework for FPGAs

In the last decade, OpenCL has sparked the interest of the computing world as it is a language based on an open standard that can run on many different heterogeneous platforms. This standard is continuously evolving to adapt to various use cases of different platforms. For example, with requests from the FPGA community, the pipe construct was added to the standard to facilitate the implementation of streaming applications. The versatility of the pipe construct allows several different usage modes. In this paper, we explore various implementations of pipes to evaluate the pipe construct. Our results show that for the FIFO mode, an implementation using an off-the-shelf component is favourable due to its performance and resource usage. However for the remaining modes, our proposed pipe implementation performs significantly better than other implementations at a resource utilization cost that is insignificant when compared to the abundance of resources in modern FPGAs.