Most of my effort this week was spent on getting a lightened version of the fluid simulation kernel to build on Vitis HLS. This comes as a transition in our priorities to better make an MVP target for our project. Specifically, we were interested in implementing a “headless” version of the simulation kernel, where the only thing that we would specifically need to run is the step2 function in the fluid simulation kernel. We decided that all of the rest of the rendering tasks are not as pressing and should thus be handled at a later point.
Much of the work of this week was setting up the Vitis HLS project on the ECE number machines. We were running into some significant build issues running on Alice’s computer, and the documentation online was frustratingly sparse. As such, in order to make some breakthroughs in our project, we decided to transition to the existing, working, setup that 643 uses. Setting up the project took a bit of work, but we were eventually able to resolve a lot of the bulid issues and get the C simulation task to build. A large part of this task was refactoring parts of the code to remove C++17 artefacts and using different versions of the different libraries that the Scotty3D library depends on.
Right now, we are still trying to figure out how to get the C synthesis to fully build. It is a bit difficult at the moment, as the synthesis log is not actually highlighting the error. However, I think it might have something to do with the tool inferring multiple TOP functions.
Obviously, the goal for next week is to get a working version of C synthesis running.