MVPA: An FPGA based multi-vector processor architecture

Abstract

With the increase in FPGA density and performance, the demand for multiple high-performance computing (HPC) units has been increased for various scientific and technological fields. Multi-scalar processor architectures do not give the best performance on FPGAs for HPC applications. This performance degradation demands a parameterizable high-performance processor architecture to process HPC applications. In this article, we proposed an FPGA based Multi-Vector Processor Architecture by integrating an efficient scheduler into existing Programmable Vector Memory Controller (PVMC). The proposed design is known as Multi-Vector Processor Architecture (MVPA) which proficiently handles multiple vectorized tasks and their data movements. The system is tested on n Altera FPGA DE4 development board. The MVPA system results are compared with a generic Multi-Vector Processor and multi-scalar core systems. The results show that the MVPA system handles computation task more efficiently and improves system performance between 8.1x to 30.1x and 1.99x to 4.31x against scalar multi-core and generic Multi-Vector Processor systems respectively for 10 applications.