Using floating-point arithmetic on FPGAs to accelerate scientific N-Body simulations

Abstract

This paper investigates the usage of floating-point arithmetic on FPGAs for N-Body simulation in natural science. The common aspect of these applications is the simple computing structure where forces between a particle and its surrounding particles are summed up. The role of reduced precision arithmetic is discussed, and our implementation of a floating-point arithmetic library with parameterized operators is presented. On the base of this library, implementation strategies of complex arithmetic units are discussed. Finally the realization of a fully pipelined pressure force calculation unit consisting of 60 floating-point operators with a resulting performance of 3.9 Gflops on an off the shelf FPGA is presented.