Toward FPGA-Based HPC: Advancing Interconnect Technologies

HPC architects are currently facing myriad challenges from ever tighter power constraints and changing workload characteristics. In this article we discuss the current state of FPGAs within HPC systems. Recent technological advances show that they are well placed for penetration into the HPC market. However, there are still a number of research problems to overcome; we address the requirements for system architectures and interconnects to enable their proper exploitation, highlighting the necessity of allowing FPGAs to act as full-fledged peers within a distributed system rather than attached to the CPU. We argue that this model requires a reliable, connectionless, hardware-offloaded transport supporting a global memory space. Our results show how our fully-fledged hardware implementation gives latency improvements of up to 25% versus a software-based transport, and demonstrates that our solution can outperform the state of the art in HPC workloads such as matrix-matrix multiplication achieving a 10% higher computing throughput.