A technical paper titled “TAPA-CS: Enabling Scalable Accelerator Design on Distributed HBM-FPGAs” was published by researchers at University of California Los Angeles.
“Despite the increasing adoption of Field-Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in compute clouds, there remains a significant gap in programming tools and abstractions which can leverage network-connected, cloud-scale, multi-die FPGAs to generate accelerators with high frequency and throughput. To this end, we propose TAPA-CS, a task-parallel dataflow programming framework which automatically partitions and compiles a large design across a cluster of FPGAs with no additional user effort while achieving high frequency and throughput. TAPA-CS has three main contributions. First, it is an open-source framework which allows users to leverage virtually “unlimited” accelerator fabric, high-bandwidth memory (HBM), and on-chip memory, by abstracting away the underlying hardware. This reduces the user’s programming burden to a logical one, enabling software developers and researchers with limited FPGA domain knowledge to deploy larger designs than possible earlier. Second, given as input a large design, TAPA-CS automatically partitions the design to map to multiple FPGAs, while ensuring congestion control, resource balancing, and overlapping of communication and computation. Third, TAPA-CS couples coarse-grained floorplanning with automated interconnect pipelining at the inter- and intra-FPGA levels to ensure high frequency. We have tested TAPA-CS on our multi-FPGA testbed where the FPGAs communicate through a high-speed 100GBps Ethernet infrastructure. We have evaluated the performance and scalability of our tool on designs, including systolic-array based convolutional neural networks (CNNs), graph processing workloads such as page rank, stencil applications like the Dilate kernel, and K-nearest neighbors (KNN). TAPA-CS has the potential to accelerate development of increasingly complex and large designs on the low power and reconfigurable FPGAs.”
Find the technical paper here. Published November 2023 (preprint).
Prakriya, Neha, Yuze Chi, Suhail Basalama, Linghao Song, and Jason Cong. “TAPA-CS: Enabling Scalable Accelerator Design on Distributed HBM-FPGAs.” arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.10189 (2023).
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