A matrix multiplier case study for an evaluation of a configurable dataflow-machine

Abstract

Configurable computing has become a subject of a great deal of research given its potential to greatly accelerate a wide variety of applications that require high throughput. In this context, the dataflow approach is still promising to accelerate the kernel of applications in the field of HPC. That tanks to a computational dataflow engine able to execute dataflow program graphs directly in a custom hardware. On the other hand, evaluating radically different models of computation remains yet an open issue. In this paper we present as case study the matrix multiplication that constitutes the fundamental kernel of the linear algebra. The evaluation takes into account the execution of the matrix product both in non-pipelined and pipelined modes. Results obtained running the execution of the two modes on an FPGA-based demonstrator show the validity of the configurable Dataflow-Machine. Moreover, at the same throughput, the power consumption is expected to be lower than in clock-based systems.