Hey all-
This is – for now – a purely academic question: does it make sense and how would one represent device data in MLIR? I’m defining ‘device data’ as information about the physical structure of a device: LUTs, memories, DSPs, PCIe MACs, DRAM controllers, their location(s) on the chip, routing resources, timing information, etc. The stuff contained in the vendors’ device databases.
We could use this information to floorplan. For instance with ESI: to communicate from the PCIe interface to the HBM controller on the opposite side of the chip, you’ll probably need a pretty deep pipeline. Knowing the physical locations is the first step to estimating the number of stages necessary.
I don’t think it makes sense to encode this information in an MLIR IR, but I may just not be creative enough. I also don’t see any specific advantages of doing this, though I’m not familiar enough with the graph algorithms present in MLIR to say. Maybe there’s some advantage of having a way to encode physical locations in MLIR IR for placement optimizations, but encoding the device data itself…?