Input Formats

Top-Level Keys

Timeloop and Accelergy take inputs in the form of a YAML file with specific top-level keys. These top-level keys may be included in one or more files (one or more top-level keys per file) that are concatenated together by the tool.

Some keys are used only for one of the programs or are optional. So a skeleton input with the top-level keys for a run of timeloop-mapper would look like:

problem:
    ...

architecture:
    ...

sparse_optimizations:
    ...

contraints:
   ....

mapper:
   ....

The following top-level keys are available to the Timeloop+Accelergy specification.

Top-level keys that are wrapped in * may be specified multiple times using prefixes and suffixes (e.g., constraints_1, constraints_2, map_constraints, arch_constraints). Their contents will be combined by the parser.

• architecture: The architecture specification.
• *constraints*: Additional constraints on the mapspace (optional).
• *variables*: Top-level variables to be used in parsing (optional).
• *components*: Compound components used in the system.
• mapper: Directives for the Mapper such as search algorithm and timeout (only if using the Mapper).
• problem: Workload specification.
• sparse_optimizations: Optimizations available for sparse tensor accelerators.
• *globals*: Global environment variables and directives for the parser.
• mapspace: Directives describing the mapspace (i.e., imperfectly-factorized or perfectly-factorized)

Jinja parsing

The Timeloop Python Front-End can take in a Jinja2 template and parse it to create a top-level file.

Parser functions available

• add_to_path(path): Adds a path to the environment. This will be used to search for files in later parsing.
• cwd(): Returns the path of the current file. - include(file_path, subkey=None): Parses the other file, returning the value at the subkey. If subkey is None, the contents of the full file are returned. This function substutes a YAML object into the YAML object of the current location; it does not do text substitution. Subkey may also be a period-separated list of subkeys (e.g., "a.b.c").
• include_text(file_path): Substitutes text from the file into the current location. This function does text substitution.
• include_all(file_path, subkey): Parses all files that match the file_path and returns a list with the content of each file. This function substutes a YAML object into the YAML object of the current location; it does not do text substitution. Subkey may also be a period-separated list of subkeys (e.g., "a.b.c").
• path_exists(path): Returns True if a path exists and False otherwise.

Example top-level file using Jinja2 templating