HBM2 Memory System for HPC Applications on an FPGA

Abstract

Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have been targeted as a new accelerator of the HPC field. This is because the barrier to using FPGAs has been gradually lowered due to the widespread use of high-level synthesis (HLS) technology. In addition, the bandwidth of external memory in FPGAs is much lower than that of other accelerators widely used in HPC, such as NVIDIA V100 GPUs. However, the latest FPGAs can use High Bandwidth Memory 2 (HBM2), which has a memory bandwidth of up to 512GB/s. Therefore, we believe FPGAs will be a viable option for speeding up applications. However, unlike CPUs and GPUs, FPGAs do not have caches and memory networks to exploit the full potential of HBM2, which may limit the efficiency of the application. In this paper, we propose a memory system for HBM2 and HPC applications. We show the prototype implementation of the system and evaluate its performance. We also demonstrate the use of the proposed system from an application developed in High-Level Synthesis (HLS) written in C++.