Enabling FPGA support in Matlab based heterogeneous systems

Abstract

FPGAs have been shown to provide orders of magnitude improvement over CPUs and GPUs in terms of absolute performance and energy efficiency for various kernels such as Cholesky decomposition, matrix inversion, and FFT among others. Despite this, the overall performance of many applications suffer when implemented entirely in FPGAs. Combining FPGAs with CPUs and GPUs provides the range of capabilities needed to support diverse computational requirements of applications. Integrating FPGAs into these systems challenges application developers with constructing hardware kernel implementations and interfacing from the low level hardware logic in the FPGA to the high speed networks that connect processors in the system. In this work we extend the compute capabilities of Matlab by incorporating support for FPGAs and automating the parallel code generation. We characterize the system and evaluate the performance gains that can be achieved by adding the FPGA for two compute intensive applications. We present performance results for medical imaging and fluid dynamics applications implemented in a CPU+GPU+FPGA system and achieved up to 40× improvement compared to the standard Matlab CPU+GPU environment.