The Potential for a GPU-Like Overlay Architecture for FPGAs
The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S3G4
International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing, Volume 2011, Article ID 514581, 2011
@article{kingyens2011potential,
title={The Potential for a GPU-Like Overlay Architecture for FPGAs},
author={Kingyens, J. and Steffan, J.G.},
year={2011}
}
We propose a soft processor programming model and architecture inspired by graphics processing units (GPUs) that are well-matched to the strengths of FPGAs, namely, highly parallel and pipelinable computation. In particular, our soft processor architecture exploits multithreading, vector operations, and predication to supply a floating-point pipeline of 64 stages via hardware support for up to 256 concurrent thread contexts. The key new contributions of our architecture are mechanisms for managing threads and register files that maximize data-level and instruction-level parallelism while overcoming the challenges of port limitations of FPGA block memories as well as memory and pipeline latency. Through simulation of a system that (i) is programmable via NVIDIA’s high-level Cg language, (ii) supports AMD’s CTM r5xx GPU ISA, and (iii) is realizable on an XtremeData XD1000 FPGA-based accelerator system, we demonstrate the potential for such a system to achieve 100% utilization of a deeply pipelined floating-point datapath.
October 19, 2011 by hgpu
