Porting a Lattice Boltzmann Simulation to FPGAs Using OmpSs

Abstract

Reconfigurable computing, exploiting Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), has become of great interest for both academia and industry research thanks to the possibility to greatly accelerate a variety of applications. The interest has been further boosted by recent developments of FPGA programming frameworks which allows to design applications at a higher-level of abstraction, for example using directive based approaches. In this work we describe our first experiences in porting to FPGAs an HPC application, used to simulate Rayleigh-Taylor instability of fluids with different density and temperature using Lattice Boltzmann Methods. This activity is done in the context of the FET HPC H2020 EuroEXA project which is developing an energyefficient HPC system, at exa-scale level, based on Arm processors and FPGAs. In this work we use the OmpSs directive based programming model, one of the models available within the EuroEXA project. OmpSs is developed by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) and allows to target FPGA devices as accelerators, but also commodity CPUs and GPUs, enabling code portability across different architectures. In particular, we describe the initial porting of this application, evaluating the programming efforts required, and assessing the preliminary performances on a Trenz development board hosting a Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC embedding a 16nm FinFET+ programmable logic and a multi-core Arm CPU

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