Optimising Sparse Matrix Vector multiplication for large scale FEM problems on FPGA

Sparse Matrix Vector multiplication (SpMV) is an important kernel in many scientific applications. In this work we propose an architecture and an automated customisation method to detect and optimise the architecture for block diagonal sparse matrices. We evaluate the proposed approach in the context of the spectral/hp Finite Element Method, using the local matrix assembly approach. This problem leads to a large sparse system of linear equations with block diagonal matrix which is typically solved using an iterative method such as the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient. The efficiency of the proposed architecture combined with the effectiveness of the proposed customisation method reduces BRAM resource utilisation by as much as 10 times, while achieving identical throughput with existing state of the art designs and requiring minimal development effort from the end user. In the context of the Finite Element Method, our approach enables the solution of larger problems than previously possible, enabling the applicability of FPGAs to more interesting HPC problems

An efficient sparse conjugate gradient solver using a Beneš permutation network

© 2014 Technical University of Munich (TUM).The conjugate gradient (CG) is one of the most widely used iterative methods for solving systems of linear equations. However, parallelizing CG for large sparse systems is difficult due to the inherent irregularity in memory access pattern. We propose a novel processor architecture for the sparse conjugate gradient method. The architecture consists of multiple processing elements and memory banks, and is able to compute efficiently both sparse matrix-vector multiplication, and other dense vector operations. A Beneš permutation network with an optimised control scheme is introduced to reduce memory bank conflicts without expensive logic. We describe a heuristics for offline scheduling, the effect of which is captured in a parametric model for estimating the performance of designs generated from our approach

CASK - Open-source custom architectures for sparse kernels

© 2016 ACM.Sparse matrix vector multiplication (SpMV) is an impor- tant kernel in many scientific applications. To improve the performance and applicability of FPGA based SpMV, we propose an approach for exploiting properties of the input matrix to generate optimised custom architectures. The ar- chitectures generated by our approach are between 3.8 to 48 times faster than the worst case architectures for each matrix, showing the benefits of instance specific design for SpMV

Run-time reconfigurable acceleration for genetic programming fitness evaluation in trading strategies

Genetic programming can be used to identify complex patterns in financial markets which may lead to more advanced trading strategies. However, the computationally intensive nature of genetic programming makes it difficult to apply to real world problems, particularly in real-time constrained scenarios. In this work we propose the use of Field Programmable Gate Array technology to accelerate the fitness evaluation step, one of the most computationally demanding operations in genetic programming. We propose to develop a fully-pipelined, mixed precision design using run-time reconfiguration to accelerate fitness evaluation. We show that run-time reconfiguration can reduce resource consumption by a factor of 2 compared to previous solutions on certain configurations. The proposed design is up to 22 times faster than an optimised, multithreaded software implementation while achieving comparable financial returns

Dfesnippets: An open-source library for dataflow acceleration on FPGAs

Highly-tuned FPGA implementations can achieve significant performance and power efficiency gains over general purpose hardware. However the limited development productivity has prevented mainstream adoption of FPGAs in many areas such as High Performance Computing. High level standard development libraries are increasingly adopted in improving productivity. We propose an approach for performance critical applications including standard library modules, benchmarking facilities and application benchmarks to support a variety of usecases. We implement the proposed approach as an open-source library for a commercially available FPGA system and highlight applications and productivity gains