DaCO: A High-Performance Token Dataflow Coprocessor Overlay for FPGAs

Dataflow computing architectures exploit dynamic parallelism at the fine granularity of individual operations and provide a pathway to overcome the performance and energy limits of conventional von Neumann models. In this vein, we present DaCO (Dataflow Coprocessor FPGA Overlay), a high-performance compute organization for FPGAs to deliver up to 2.5x speedup over existing dataflow alternatives. Historically, dataflow-style execution has been viewed as an attractive parallel computing paradigm due to the self-timed, decentralized nature of implementation of dataflow dependencies and an absence of sequential program counters. However, realising high-performance dataflow computers has remained elusive largely due to the complexity of scheduling this parallelism and data communication bottlenecks. DaCO achieves this by (1) supporting large-scale (1000s of nodes) out-of-order scheduling using hierarchical lookup, (2) priority-aware routing of dataflow dependencies using the efficient Hoplite-Q NoC, and (3) clustering techniques to exploit data locality in the communication network organization. Each DaCO processing element is a programmable soft processor and it communicates with others using a packet-switching network-on-chip (PSNoC). We target the Arria 10 AX115S FPGA to take advantage of the hard floating-point DSP blocks, and maximize performance by multipumping the M20K Block RAMs. Overall, we can scale DaCO to 450 processors operating at an fmax of 250 MHz on the target platform. Each soft processor consumes 779 ALMs, 4 M20K BRAMs, and 3 hard floating-point DSP blocks for optimum balance, while the on-chip communication framework consumes < 15% of the on-chip resources.