Abstract

Many instruments used in high-energy particle physics observations, e.g., gamma-ray telescopes, use FPGAs for front-end signal processing of raw sensor data. The use of high-level synthesis (HLS) to express the signal processing algorithms has the potential to significantly reduce development time for new instruments of this type. We describe our experience with one of the computational stages in the signal processing pipeline, island detection, exploring its implementation across multiple configurations: 1D versus 2D islands, and 4-way versus 8-way connected-component labeling (CCL) in the 2D configuration. We report resource usage and performance for both configurations of 2D island detection, including the required optimizations necessary for HLS to be effective. Results indicate that our implementation can perform 4-way CCL on 15k images per second even for 43 x 43 pixel arrays.

Meeting Name

SC '25 Workshops of the International Conference for High Performance Computing, Networking, Storage and Analysis

Department(s)

Computer Science

Publication Status

Open Access

Comments

University of Washington, Grant 80NSSC21K1741

Keywords and Phrases

CCL; high-level synthesis; particle physics

Document Type

Article - Conference proceedings

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2026 The Authors, All rights reserved.

Creative Commons Licensing

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License.

Publication Date

15 Nov 2025

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