Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

by Marc Bernard René Gay-Balmaz -
Number of replies: 6

Hi !

I don't know what I can do, each time I try to compile my design with quartus, it runs for hours and finishes by crashing (either it crashes my computer entirely or just quartus, but it doesn't give any information about why it crashes).
I tried to compile it directly on my OS (on windows 10) and in the VM given for this course and the result is the same. Also, it takes around 4 hours and a half before crashing, which is also weired as I have an i9 and 64G of RAM.

Do you have any suggestion on how to fix this? Should I try with a more recent version of quartus ?

Thanks in advance for your help !

In reply to Marc Bernard René Gay-Balmaz

Re: Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

by Sahand Kashani -

Hi,

This type of problem often occurs when a CAD tool is stuck in a long loop trying to find a design that can successfully be routed.

What does your system do, and is it implemented by having many signals with very large fan-outs (signal broadcast to many places)?

In reply to Sahand Kashani

Re: Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

by Marc Bernard René Gay-Balmaz -

My system is implementing a convolutional neural network (smaller than a fully connected that didn't fit in the FPGA)

Oh, about that it crashes still in the Analysis & Synthesis part of the compilation, I am thus not completely convinced it comes from the routing...

There are big buses but they don't really broadcast, they mostly go from one component to the next, I don't think they fan-out so much in that context

In reply to Marc Bernard René Gay-Balmaz

Re: Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

by Sahand Kashani -
Oh, if it's crashing at analysis & synthesis, then it is indeed not related to routing.
What's the size of the CNN? How many layers, number of neurons per layer, and what's the data width at each?
I'm not sure, but it may be possible Quartus is already choosing whether to implement each multiplier in your circuit as a DSP or not, and there aren't many of those around.
In reply to Sahand Kashani

Re: Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

by Sahand Kashani -

Can you try incrementally removing layers from the CNN to see if it fixes the issue? This is just so you can figure out what component, when added to the design, all of a sudden causes the compiler to take much longer to run.

In reply to Sahand Kashani

Re: Quartus compilation crashes after hours of compilation

by Marc Bernard René Gay-Balmaz -
It's pretty big I'd say, but I use lightweight operations.
It has 3 layers of convolution neurons and then 2 dense layers. The convolutional layers have 225, 225 and 144 neurons and the dense have 25 and 10 neurons. The thing that takes most of the place in my design is the number of registers needed to store the weights (it makes like 20'444, which is a pretty big number).
The data width at the entry of the CNN is 28x28(= 784), after the first layer it is 9x28x28, then I do a max pooling so it becomes 9x14x14, then after the next layer it stays 9x14x14, after the last convolutional layer it becomes 16x14x14 and here I do a second max_pooling so it becomes 16x7x7 (= 784) again. Then after the first dense it is 25 and the output is 10.
And I don't do multiplications nor additions, as I encode my values as bit implusions so I shouldn't have any ploblem with DSP