Setup Your Environment

Only modern Linux distributions running on 64-bit x86 machines are supported at this time.

Install AMD/Xilinx Vitis HLS

You will need AMD/Xilinx Vitis HLS 2021.1 installed, which you can download from the Vitis Archive.

Warning

Running LightningSim with newer versions of Vitis HLS may cause significantly less accurate simulation results, as will be explained later. We are working on fixing this for the latest versions of Vitis HLS.

Install conda

You will also need conda installed. Installation instructions are available at this page at docs.conda.io.

We recommend using the Miniconda installer.

Note

To the author’s best knowledge, the conda environment we will create for LightningSim only supports POSIX-compliant shells such as bash or zsh, and does not support shells such as csh/tcsh. This is because the environment includes .sh activation scripts that do not run in non-POSIX shells, causing errors during later usage of LightningSim.

Please ensure you are using a POSIX-compliant shell such as bash or zsh.

Download the Examples

The example HLS designs used in this tutorial are available in the examples directory within the GitHub repository for this documentation. You can clone this repository:

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/sharc-lab/lightningsim-doc.git

Or download the ZIP and extract its contents to a location of your choice.

Note

The remainder of the tutorial assumes you downloaded the repository to your current working directory and refers to the repository as lightningsim-doc. If you downloaded the repository to a different location, please adjust the paths accordingly.

You are now ready to try out LightningSim!