2D Stencil Computation on Cyclone V SoC FPGA using OpenCL

Abstract

We present the implementation of a 2D stencil computation on Cyclone V SoC Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The heat equation is chosen as a study case for the 2D stencil problem. To reduce the development time in FPGA programming, OpenCL programming language is employed to develop the kernel for the stencil computation. OpenCL is a framework to develop the kernel that can be executed in heterogeneous platforms such as CPU, DSP, GPU, and FPGA. In the study, we compare the execution time and power consumption between core i5 4300U CPU and Cyclone V FPGA. The experiment shows that the Cyclone V SoC FPGA is faster than a single core i5 4300U CPU in executing the 2D stencil computation. The research also shows that the FPGA consumes low power.