An FPGA-Based Accelerator for the 2D Implicit FDM and Its Application to Heat Conduction Simulations (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are extremely advanced with regard to high performance; they are becoming one of the primary device choices to realize high-performance computing (HPC). In this work, we propose an FPGA-based accelerator for the two-dimensional (2D) finite difference method (FDM) with the implicit scheme and implement a 2D unsteady-state heat conduction simulation using red/black successive over-relaxation (SOR). The accelerator consists of a 2D single-instruction multiple-data (SIMD) array processor, which has pipelined processing elements (PEs) including 32-bit floating point calculation units. This processor can avoid the memory-access bottleneck and perform with high operating efficiency and low waiting time for data transfer by applying the proposed control method with synchronous shift data transfer. We demonstrate that the experimental hardware implemented on an Altera Stratix V FPGA (5SGSMD5K2F40C2N) reaches a 99.83% operating rate of the calculation units for the computation of red/black SOR. In addition, it is approximately six times faster than GPU computing on an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 for a 32-bit floating-point calculation of a printed circuit board (PCB) heat conduction simulation, and it is about eight times faster than an NVIDIA Tesla C2075 for the same calculation.