Automated parameter sweeping

Parameter Sweeping

In many designs, you may want to sweep over multiple parameters values to test out various tradeoffs. In general, once the designs become more complicated, you will want to automate this process.

Vitis HLS provides a rich systems for automating testing through TCL scripts. As an example, the repository contains a TCL script

    hwdesign/vector_mult/vmult_vitis/scripts/sweep_unroll.tcl

that provides commands to run the multiple C synthesis runs with different loop unrolling factors.

The script can be run as follows:

In the terminal, navigate to the directory, cd hwdesign/vector_mult/vmult_vitis

Run the script with:

vitis-run --mode hls --tcl scripts/sweep_unroll.tcl

Running the script will take about 1 minute for each unroll factor. There will be a large number of print outs. At the end, it will create a set of directories:
```
 vmult_vitis
 ├── vmult_hls
 │   └── sol_uf1
 │   └── sol_uf2
 │   └── sol_uf4
 │   └── sol_uf8
```
Each directory has all the synthesis outputs for each unroll factor.
The script also copies the synthesis reports into a directory vmult_vitis/vmult_reports with files of the form
```
  vmult_vitis/vmult_reports/mult_loop_csynth_uf1.xml
  vmult_vitis/vmult_reports/mult_loop_csynth_uf2.xml
  ...
```
Each of these files is an XML file with the synthesis results for the multiplcation loop.
Go to the jupyter notebook to analyze the results.