Hardware Acceleration of Matrix Multiplication on a Xilinx FPGA

Abstract

The first MEMOCODE hardware/software co-design contest posed the following problem: optimize matrix-matrix multiplication in such a way that it is split between the FPGA and PowerPC on a Xilinx Virtex IIPro30. In this paper we discuss our solution, which we implemented on a Xilinx XUP development board with 256 MB of DRAM. The design was done by the five authors over a span of approximately 3 weeks, though of the 15 possible man-weeks, about 9 were actually spent working on this problem. All hardware design was done using Blue-spec SystemVerilog (BSV), with the exception of an imported Verilog multiplication unit, necessary only due to the limitations of the Xilinx FPGA toolflow optimizations.