Abstract
FPGAs are widely deployed on high-energy astrophysics telescopes to preprocess and reduce sensor data read out by front-end electronics. Across instruments, these computational pipelines have similar semantics, sharing common stages such as pedestal subtraction, signal integration, zero-suppression, island detection, and centroiding. However, diverse telescope designs require unique implementations of these algorithms, and the logic is often rewritten from scratch for a new instrument. As an alternative, High-Level Synthesis (HLS) tools enable these algorithms to be implemented in a high-level language, which eases modifications and enables fast prototyping and deployment. Nonetheless, writing performant HLS code requires augmentation of the code with compiler-specific pragmas. In this work, we illustrate these challenges in the context of the Advanced Particle-astrophysics Telescope (APT), a proposed space-based observatory for gamma-ray sources, and its Antarctic Demonstrator (ADAPT). We implement its front-end algorithms using HLS, demonstrate the use of pragmas to enable optimizations, then explore speed and area tradeoffs, which are especially important given the limited power budget afforded by a satellite instrument. We demonstrate that with HLS, ADAPT will be able to process scintillating tile data from 200 000 gamma-ray events per second.
Recommended Citation
M. Sudvarg et al., "HLS Taking Flight: Toward Using High-Level Synthesis Techniques In A Space-Borne Instrument," Proceedings of the 21st ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers Cf 2024, pp. 115 - 125, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), May 2024.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1145/3649153.3649209
Department(s)
Computer Science
Publication Status
Open Access
Keywords and Phrases
astrophysics telescopes; gamma-ray astronomy; hardware synthesis
International Standard Book Number (ISBN)
979-8-4007-0597-7
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Citation
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2026 The Authors, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Publication Date
07 May 2024
Included in
Databases and Information Systems Commons, Other Computer Sciences Commons, Systems Architecture Commons
Comments
Recommended Citation: Marion Sudvarg, Chenfeng Zhao, Ye Htet, Meagan Konst, Thomas Lang, Nick Song, Roger D. Chamberlain, Jeremy Buhler, and James H. Buckley. 2024. HLS Taking Flight: Toward Using High-Level Synthesis Techniques in a Space-Borne Instrument. In 21st ACM International Conference on Computing Frontiers (CF ’24), May 7–9, 2024, Ischia, Italy. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 11 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3649153.3649209
Acknowledgements: The authors would like to acknowledge the entire APT Collaboration (see https://adapt.physics.wustl.edu/). Support was provided by NASA award 80NSSC21K1741 and NSF award CNS-1763503.