Hybrid Network Utilization for Efficient Communication in a Tightly Coupled FPGA Cluster

Abstract

A tightly coupled FPGA cluster is a promising approach for large-scale parallel processing with application specialized hardware. Along with the advantages of FPGA-based custom computing, such as high power efficiency, a customized network subsystem with efficient communication through direct Inter-FPGA links allows an FPGA cluster to be an effective platform for large-scale parallel processing. However, the cluster can suffer from substantial communication costs when a cluster becomes larger to obtain higher computing performance. In this paper, we propose to exploit the communication capacity of a host server network to improve communication performance. Besides, we show estimations for practical communication patterns on a network model in which we efficiently use both the FPGA and the host networks.