4 research outputs found
Flip: Data-Centric Edge CGRA Accelerator
Coarse-Grained Reconfigurable Arrays (CGRA) are promising edge accelerators
due to the outstanding balance in flexibility, performance, and energy
efficiency. Classic CGRAs statically map compute operations onto the processing
elements (PE) and route the data dependencies among the operations through the
Network-on-Chip. However, CGRAs are designed for fine-grained static
instruction-level parallelism and struggle to accelerate applications with
dynamic and irregular data-level parallelism, such as graph processing. To
address this limitation, we present Flip, a novel accelerator that enhances
traditional CGRA architectures to boost the performance of graph applications.
Flip retains the classic CGRA execution model while introducing a special
data-centric mode for efficient graph processing. Specifically, it exploits the
natural data parallelism of graph algorithms by mapping graph vertices onto
processing elements (PEs) rather than the operations, and supporting dynamic
routing of temporary data according to the runtime evolution of the graph
frontier. Experimental results demonstrate that Flip achieves up to 36
speedup with merely 19% more area compared to classic CGRAs. Compared to
state-of-the-art large-scale graph processors, Flip has similar energy
efficiency and 2.2 better area efficiency at a much-reduced power/area
budget