Persistent hardware memory (HAST-247)

[Piedone]

The idea is to have memory (SimpleMemory) values persist between hardware entry point calls. The use-case is that you have multiple computations using the same large dataset (like a big image) and you don't want to copy this large input to the hardware every time. So, you'd copy it only once, then let subsequent hardware entry point calls use it. This requires that you only use a single FPGA (otherwise the data set needs to be copied to all connected FPGAs).

We could implement this somehow by marking parts of a SimpleMemory object as persistent: then that wouldn't be sent over to the hardware every time and it wouldn't be overwritten.

Jira issue