Reconfigurable accelerator for quantum Monte Carlo simulations in N-body systems

Recent advances in FPGA technology make them an attractive platform for accelerating scientific computing applications. We present a novel hardware accelerator for Quantum Monte Carlo simulations in N-body systems. The design is deeply pipelined and exploits the inherent fine-grained parallelism available using an FPGA for all calculations. The design is implemented on a Xilinx Virtex II Pro XC2VP30 device and preliminary results indicate a maximum operating frequency of 100MHz. A single instance of our design offers an estimated speedup of 20x and accuracy comparable to the serial code running on a 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor. This architecture performs all computations with fixed-point representation and delivers accuracy on the order of or better than double-precision floating point. After deploying a single instance on the present FPGA platform, targeting our design on the Cray XD1 platform with a high gate-density FPGA will allow us to operate multiple cores in parallel.