OpenCL-enabled GPU-FPGA Accelerated Computing with Inter-FPGA Communication

Abstract

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) have garnered significant interest in high-performance computing research; their computational and communication capabilities have drastically improved in recent years owing to advances in semiconductor integration technologies. In addition to improving FPGA performance, toolchains for the development of FPGAs in OpenCL that reduce the amount of programming effort required have been developed and offered by FPGA vendors. These improvements reveal the possibility of implementing a concept that enables on-the-fly offloading of computational loads at which CPUs/GPUs perform poorly compared to FPGAs while moving data with low latency. We think that this concept is key to improving the performance of heterogeneous supercomputers that use accelerators such as the GPU. In this paper, we propose an approach for GPU--FPGA accelerated computing with the OpenCL programming framework that is based on the OpenCL-enabled GPU--FPGA DMA method and the FPGA-to-FPGA communication method. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method can enable GPUs and FPGAs to work together over different nodes.