A Message Passing Interface Library for High-Level Synthesis on Multi-FPGA Systems

Abstract

One obstacle to application development on multi-FPGA systems with high-level synthesis (HLS) is a lack of support for a programming interface. Implementing and debugging an application on multiple FPGA boards is difficult without a standard interface. Message Passing Interface (MPI) is a standard parallel programming interface commonly used in distributed memory systems. This paper presents a tool-independent MPI library called FiC-MPI that can be used in HLS for multi-FPGA systems in which each FPGA node is connected directly. By using FiC-MPI, various parallel software, including a general-purpose benchmark, can be easily implemented. FiC-MPI was implemented and evaluated on the M-KUBOS cluster consisting of Zynq MPSoC boards connected with a static time-division multiplexing network. By using the FiC-MPI simulator, parallel programs can be debugged before implementing on real machines. As a case study, the Himeno-BMT benchmark was implemented with FiC-MPI. It achieved 178.7 MFLOPS with a single node and scaled to 643.7 MFLOPS with four nodes, and 896.9 MFLOPS with six nodes of the M-KUBOS cluster. Through the implementation, the easiness of developing parallel programs with FiC-MPI on multi-FPGA systems was demonstrated.