Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Pro Edition: Programming Guide

ID 683846
Date 10/04/2021
Public

A newer version of this document is available. Customers should click here to go to the newest version.

Document Table of Contents

5.5.6. Direct Communication with Kernels via Host Pipes

The cl_intel_fpga_host_pipe extension enables point-to-point pipe communication between a kernel and the host program. Without the extension, pipes within OpenCL can only be used to communicate between kernels, and not with the host program directly.
Note: A BSP with support for host pipes is required to use the cl_intel_fpga_host_pipe extension. Without the BSP support, the clCreatePipe call fails. You can use the a10gx_hostpipe board variant in the a10_ref BSP for Intel® Arria® 10 GX Development Kit with host pipes. If you are using a custom BSP, consult your board vendor for support for host pipes.

The extension provides two new values in the flags argument of clCreatePipe to make a pipe host accessible, and adds four new API functions (clReadPipeIntelFPGA, clWritePipeIntelFPGA, clMapHostPipeIntelFPGA, and clUnmapHostPipeIntelFPGA) to allow the host to read from and write to a pipe that was created with host access enabled. A new optional kernel argument attribute is added to specify in the kernel language that the opposing end of a pipe kernel argument is the host program, and consequently that the pipe is not connected to another kernel. A pipe kernel argument is specialized in the kernel definition to connect to either a host pipe or another kernel, and cannot dynamically switch between the two at runtime.

When a pipe kernel argument is marked for host accessibility, the kernel language pipe accessors are restricted to a subset of the 2.x functions (reservations are not supported), and memory consistency or visibility guarantees are made beyond OpenCL™ synchronization points.

Support for host accessible pipes is a device property, advertised as cl_intel_fpga_host_pipe.
Note:
  • Data written to a host pipe is eventually made visible on the read side without any OpenCL synchronization point.
  • A restriction of our implementation of host pipes is that the platform only supports two host pipes. One for read and one for write. Furthermore, the compiler accepts a pipe of only 32-bytes width, and hence ulong4 is used in the Example Use of cl_intel_fpga_host_pipe Extension section.
  • Host programs using the cl_intel_fpga_host_pipe extension must include the CL/cl_ext_intelfpga.h header file and enable OpenCL 2.0 support, as described in Support Statuses of OpenCL 2.0 Features.