A custom interconnection multi-FPGA framework for distributed processing applications

Abstract

The development of multi-FPGA systems focused on high-performance computing requires high-speed channels, low bandwidth overhead and latency. In this paper, we propose a multi-FPGA interconnection framework aimed at distributed processing applications. Our solution allows efficient communication between different processing elements distributed among the FPGAs. To evaluate our proposal, we built a multi-FPGA system composed of five Zynq ZC706 FPGA boards capable of hosting a diverse number of coprocessors distributed over our custom network. With an aggregate bandwidth of up to 25 Gbps per FPGA board, the interconnection framework reaches a latency of only 200.36 ns, one of the lowest reported in the lElectronics Engineering, iterature. Experimental results show a computational efficiency of 97.25 % with a sustained throughput of 21.4 GFLOPS. Furthermore, the proposed network interconnection architecture is easily portable to the latest generation FPGAs. This makes the current proposal a competitive option for distributed processing in multi-FPGA systems.