Suitability Analysis of FPGAs for Heterogeneous Platforms in HPC

Abstract

High performance computing (HPC) systems currently integrate several resources such as multi-cores (CPUs), graphic processing units (GPUs) and reconfigurable logic devices, like field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). The role of the latter two has traditionally being confined to act as secondary accelerators rather than as main execution units. We perform a deep survey around state of the art research and implementation of HPC algorithms; we extract features relevant to each family and list them as key factors to obtain higher performance. Due to the broad spectra of the survey we only include the most complete references found. We provide a general classification of the 13 HPC families with respect to their needs and suitability for hardware implementation. In addition, we present an analysis based on current and future technology availability as well as in particular aspects identified in the survey. Finally we list general guidelines and opportunities to be accounted for in future heterogeneous designs that employ FPGAs for HPC.