FPGA Based Custom Computing Machines for Irregular Problems

Over the past few years there has been increased interest in building custom computing machines (CCMs) as a way of achieving very high performance on specific problems. The advent of high density field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), in combination with new synthesis tools, have made it relatively easy to produce programmable custom machines without building specific hardware. In many cases, the performance achieved by a FPGA based custom computer is attributed to the exploitation of massive concurrency in the underlying application. In this paper we explore the sources of speedup for irregular problems in which is difficult to exploit such parallelism. We highlight 5 main sources of speedup that we have observed, namely the provision of high memory bandwidth, the use of flexible address generation hardware, the use of gather-scatter array operations, the use of lookup tables and the use of multiple tailored arithmetic units. By considering some representative examples of such irreg...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: HPCA
• Authors: David Abramson, Paul Logothetis, Adam Postula, Marcus Randall
• Keywords: Distributed And Parallel Computing, HPCA 1998, Irregular Problems, RISC Processors, Speedup