Requirements for any FPGA/HPC Application Development Tool Flow
… if you want any reasonable fraction of the FPGA's potential performance
BOSTON
UNIVERSITY
Tom VanCourt Martin C. Herbordt Computer Architecture and Automated Design Lab
http://www.bu.edu/caadlab
What is FPGA/HPC exactly
High performance computing
Computational chem. Bioinformatics Astrophysics Electromagnetics Traffic modeling …
Field Programmable Gate Arrays
App. specific processors on demand Massive fine-grained parallelism Drivers of silicon process development
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3 Feb 2006
What's so hard about it
Performance computing ≠ logic design
Standard languages hide parallelism* FPGA tools address logic designers
Contradictions in FPGA applications
*Jeroen Voeten, ACM Trans. CAD 6(4)533-552, Oct 2001
Applications should be widely applicable … but finely tuned to each particular usage Require customization by application specialist … but require unfamiliar hardware constructs Demand full use of hardware resources … use is app-specific, resources are FPGA-specific
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3 Feb 2006
What's wrong with C to gates
"Unfortunately, and despite 40 years of parallelizing compilers for all sorts of machines, [optimization] algorithms don't work terribly well." Ian Page, 2004
The best you get is C code in gates C distributes algorithms in time
Good HW algorithm isn't SW algorithm
FPGAs distribute algorithms in space … and a whole industry is dedicated to reinventing the von Neumann bottleneck
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Example: Size-3 subsets
C style:
for i = 0 to N for j = 0 to i for k = 0 to j // use x[i],x[j],x[k]
HW-oriented solution:
…
3 Feb 2006
T. VanCourt & M. C. Herbordt
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Example: 3D Correlation

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