Evaluation of FPGA-based High Performance Computing Platforms

Sammanfattning: High performance computing is a topic that has risen to the top in the era ofdigitalization, AI and automation. Therefore, the search for more cost and timeeffective ways to implement HPC work is always a subject extensively researched.One part of this is to have hardware that is capable to improve on these criteria. Different hardware usually have different code languages to implement theseworks though, cross-platform solution like Intel’s oneAPI framework is startingto gaining popularity.In this thesis, the capabilities of Intel’s oneAPI framework to implement andexecute HPC benchmarks on different hardware platforms will be discussed. Using the hardware available through Intel’s DevCloud services, Intel’s Xeon Gold6128, Intel’s UHD Graphics P630 and the Arria10 FPGA board were all chosento use for implementation. The benchmarks that were chosen to be used wereGEMM (General Matrix Multiplication) and BUDE (Bristol University DockingEngine). They were implemented using DPC++ (Data Parallel C++), Intel’s ownSYCL-based C++ extension. The benchmarks were also tried to be improved uponwith HPC speed-up methods like loop unrolling and some hardware manipulation.The performance for CPU and GPU were recorded and compared, as the FPGAimplementation could not be preformed because of technical difficulties. Theresults are good comparison to related work, but did not improve much uponthem. This because the hardware used is quite weak compared to industry standard. Though further research on the topic would be interesting, to compare aworking FPGA implementation to the other results and results from other studies. This implementation also probably has the biggest improvement potential,so to see how good one could make it would be interesting. Also, testing someother more complex benchmarks could be interesting.