A unified approach for managing heterogeneous processing elements on FPGAs
File(s)fpl22-short-paper-sd-final---ieee-converted.pdf (1.87 MB)
Accepted version
Author(s)
Denholm, Stewart
Luk, Wayne
Type
Conference Paper
Abstract
FPGA designs do not typically include all available processing elements, e.g., LUTs, DSPs and embedded cores. Additional work is required to manage their different implementations and behaviour, which can unbalance parallel pipelines and complicate development. In this paper we introduce a novel management architecture to unify heterogeneous processing elements into compute pools. A pool formed of E processing elements, each implementing the same function, serves D parallel function calls. A call-and-response approach to computation allows for different processing element implementations, connections, latencies and non-deterministic behaviour. Our rotating scheduler automatically arbitrates access to processing elements, uses greatly simplified routing, and scales linearly with D parallel accesses to the compute pool. Processing elements can easily be added to improve performance, or removed to reduce resource use and routing, facilitating higher operating frequencies. Migrating to larger or smaller FPGAs thus comes at a known performance cost. We assess our framework with a range of neural network activation functions (ReLU, LReLU, ELU, GELU, sigmoid, swish, softplus and tanh) on the Xilinx Alveo U280.
Date Issued
2023-02-13
Date Acceptance
2023-02-01
Citation
2022 32nd International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL), 2023, pp.270-276
Publisher
IEEE
Start Page
270
End Page
276
Journal / Book Title
2022 32nd International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL)
Copyright Statement
Copyright © 2023 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
Identifier
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10035192
Source
2022 32nd International Conference on Field-Programmable Logic and Applications (FPL)
Publication Status
Published
Start Date
2022-08-29
Finish Date
2022-09-02
Coverage Spatial
Belfast, United Kingdom
Date Publish Online
2022-02-13