11,314 research outputs found
Numerical solutions of differential equations on FPGA-enhanced computers
Conventionally, to speed up scientific or engineering (S&E) computation programs
on general-purpose computers, one may elect to use faster CPUs, more memory, systems
with more efficient (though complicated) architecture, better software compilers, or even
coding with assembly languages. With the emergence of Field Programmable Gate
Array (FPGA) based Reconfigurable Computing (RC) technology, numerical scientists
and engineers now have another option using FPGA devices as core components to
address their computational problems. The hardware-programmable, low-cost, but
powerful “FPGA-enhanced computer” has now become an attractive approach for many
S&E applications.
A new computer architecture model for FPGA-enhanced computer systems and its
detailed hardware implementation are proposed for accelerating the solutions of
computationally demanding and data intensive numerical PDE problems. New FPGAoptimized
algorithms/methods for rapid executions of representative numerical methods
such as Finite Difference Methods (FDM) and Finite Element Methods (FEM) are
designed, analyzed, and implemented on it. Linear wave equations based on seismic
data processing applications are adopted as the targeting PDE problems to demonstrate
the effectiveness of this new computer model. Their sustained computational
performances are compared with pure software programs operating on commodity CPUbased
general-purpose computers. Quantitative analysis is performed from a hierarchical
set of aspects as customized/extraordinary computer arithmetic or function units, compact but flexible system architecture and memory hierarchy, and hardwareoptimized
numerical algorithms or methods that may be inappropriate for conventional
general-purpose computers. The preferable property of in-system hardware
reconfigurability of the new system is emphasized aiming at effectively accelerating the
execution of complex multi-stage numerical applications. Methodologies for
accelerating the targeting PDE problems as well as other numerical PDE problems, such
as heat equations and Laplace equations utilizing programmable hardware resources are
concluded, which imply the broad usage of the proposed FPGA-enhanced computers
Janus II: a new generation application-driven computer for spin-system simulations
This paper describes the architecture, the development and the implementation
of Janus II, a new generation application-driven number cruncher optimized for
Monte Carlo simulations of spin systems (mainly spin glasses). This domain of
computational physics is a recognized grand challenge of high-performance
computing: the resources necessary to study in detail theoretical models that
can make contact with experimental data are by far beyond those available using
commodity computer systems. On the other hand, several specific features of the
associated algorithms suggest that unconventional computer architectures, which
can be implemented with available electronics technologies, may lead to order
of magnitude increases in performance, reducing to acceptable values on human
scales the time needed to carry out simulation campaigns that would take
centuries on commercially available machines. Janus II is one such machine,
recently developed and commissioned, that builds upon and improves on the
successful JANUS machine, which has been used for physics since 2008 and is
still in operation today. This paper describes in detail the motivations behind
the project, the computational requirements, the architecture and the
implementation of this new machine and compares its expected performances with
those of currently available commercial systems.Comment: 28 pages, 6 figure
A FPGA-Based Reconfigurable Software Architecture for Highly Dependable Systems
Nowadays, systems-on-chip are commonly equipped with reconfigurable hardware. The use of hybrid architectures based on a mixture of general purpose processors and reconfigurable components has gained importance across the scientific community allowing a significant improvement of computational performance. Along with the demand for performance, the great sensitivity of reconfigurable hardware devices to physical defects lead to the request of highly dependable and fault tolerant systems. This paper proposes an FPGA-based reconfigurable software architecture able to abstract the underlying hardware platform giving an homogeneous view of it. The abstraction mechanism is used to implement fault tolerance mechanisms with a minimum impact on the system performanc
PROGRAPE-1: A Programmable, Multi-Purpose Computer for Many-Body Simulations
We have developed PROGRAPE-1 (PROgrammable GRAPE-1), a programmable
multi-purpose computer for many-body simulations. The main difference between
PROGRAPE-1 and "traditional" GRAPE systems is that the former uses FPGA (Field
Programmable Gate Array) chips as the processing elements, while the latter
rely on the hardwired pipeline processor specialized to gravitational
interactions. Since the logic implemented in FPGA chips can be reconfigured, we
can use PROGRAPE-1 to calculate not only gravitational interactions but also
other forms of interactions such as van der Waals force, hydrodynamical
interactions in SPH calculation and so on. PROGRAPE-1 comprises two Altera
EPF10K100 FPGA chips, each of which contains nominally 100,000 gates. To
evaluate the programmability and performance of PROGRAPE-1, we implemented a
pipeline for gravitational interaction similar to that of GRAPE-3. One pipeline
fitted into a single FPGA chip, which operated at 16 MHz clock. Thus, for
gravitational interaction, PROGRAPE-1 provided the speed of 0.96
Gflops-equivalent. PROGRAPE will prove to be useful for wide-range of
particle-based simulations in which the calculation cost of interactions other
than gravity is high, such as the evaluation of SPH interactions.Comment: 20 pages with 9 figures; submitted to PAS
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