Intel® oneAPI Programming Guide

Programming Guide

Contents

Compile and Emulate Your Design

To compile and emulate your FPGA kernel design, perform the following steps:
  1. Modify the host part of your program to declare the
    ext::intel::fpga_emulator_selector
     device selector. Use this
    device_selector
     when instantiating a device queue for enqueuing your FPGA device kernel.
  2. Compile your design by including the
    -fintelfpga
     option in your
    dpcpp
     command to generate an executable.
  3. Run the resulting executable:
    • For Windows:
      1. Define the number of emulated devices by invoking the following command:
        set CL_CONFIG_CPU_EMULATE_DEVICES=<number_of_devices>
      2. Run the executable.
      3. Invoke the following command to unset the variable:
        set CL_CONFIG_CPU_EMULATE_DEVICES=
    • For Linux, invoke the following command:
      env CL_CONFIG_CPU_EMULATE_DEVICES=<number_of_devices> <executable_filename>
      This command specifies the number of identical emulation devices that the emulator must provide.
      If you want to use only one emulator device, you need not set the
      CL_CONFIG_CPU_EMULATE_DEVICES
       environment variable.
  • The Intel® FPGA Emulation Platform for OpenCL™ does not provide access to physical boards. Only the emulated devices are available.
  • The emulator is built with GCC 7.4.0 as part of the Intel® oneAPI DPC++/C++ Compiler. When running the executable for an emulated FPGA device, the version of
    libstdc++.so
     must be at least that of GCC 7.4.0. In other words, the
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH
     environment variable must ensure that the correct version of
    libstdc++.so
     is found.
    If the correct version of
    libstdc++.so
     is not found, the call to
    clGetPlatformIDs
     function fails to load the FPGA emulator platform and returns
    CL_PLATFORM_NOT_FOUND_KHR
     (error code
    -1001
    ). Depending on which version of
    libstdc++.so
     is found, the call to
    clGetPlatformIDs
     may succeed, but a later call to the
    clCreateContext
     function may fail with
    CL_DEVICE_NOT_AVAILABLE
     (error code
    -2
    ).
    If the
    LD_LIBRARY_PATH
     does not point to a compatible
    libstdc++.so
    , use the following syntax to invoke the host program:
    env LD_LIBRARY_PATH=<path to compatible libstdc++.so>:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH <executable> [executable arguments]
  • To enable debugging of kernel code, optimizations are disabled by default for the FPGA emulator. This can lead to sub-optimal execution speed when emulating kernel code. You can pass the
    -g0
     flag to the
    dpcpp
     compile command to disable debugging and enable optimizations. This enables faster emulator execution.
  • When targeting the FPGA emulator device, use the
    -O2
     compiler flag to turn on optimizations and speed up the emulation. To turn off optimizations (for example, to facilitate debugging), pass
    -O0
    .

Product and Performance Information

1

Performance varies by use, configuration and other factors. Learn more at www.Intel.com/PerformanceIndex.