High Performance Computing with FPGAs and OpenCL

Abstract: In this work we evaluate the potential of FPGAs for accelerating HPC workloads as a more power-efficient alternative to GPUs. Using High-Level Synthesis and a large set of optimization techniques, we show that FPGAs can achieve better performance than CPUs, and better power efficiency than both CPUs and GPUs for typical HPC workloads. Furthermore, we show that for the specific case of stencil computation, the unique architectural advantages of FPGAs allow them to surpass high-end CPU, Xeon Phi and GPU devices. Unlike previous work, our FPGA-based stencil accelerator combines spatial blocking with temporal blocking to achieve high performance without restricting input size. With support for high-order stencils, we achieve the highest single-FPGA performance for 2D and 3D stencil computation of any order, to this day.