Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Pro Edition: Best Practices Guide

ID 683521
Date 3/28/2022
Public

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5.8.3. High Stall and High Occupancy Percentages

A load and store operation or channel with a high stall percentage is the cause of the kernel pipeline stall.
Remember: An ideal kernel pipeline condition has a stall percentage of 0% and an occupancy percentage of 100%.

Usually, the sum of the stall and occupancy percentages approximately equals 100%. If a load and store operation or channel has a high stall percentage, it means that the load and store operation or channel has the ability to execute every cycle but is generating stalls.

Solutions for stalling global load and store operations:

  • Use local memory to cache data.
  • Reduce the number of times you read the data.
  • Improve global memory accesses.
    • Change the access pattern for more global-memory-friendly addressing (for example, change from stride accessing to sequential accessing).
    • Compile your kernel with the -no-interleaving=default Intel® FPGA SDK for OpenCL™ Offline Compiler command option, and separate the read and write buffers into different DDR banks.
    • Have fewer but wider global memory accesses.
  • Acquire an accelerator board that has more bandwidth (for example, a board with three DDRs instead of 2 DDRs).

Solution for stalling local load and store operations:

  • Review the HTML area report to verify the local memory configuration and modify the configuration to make it stall-free.

Solutions for stalling channels:

  • Fix stalls on the other side of the channel. For example, if channel read stalls, it means that the writer to the channel is not writing data into the channel fast enough and needs to be adjusted.
  • If there are channel loops in your design, specify the channel depth.