Algorithm and architecture optimization for large size two dimensional discrete fourier transform (abstract only)

We present a poster showcasing our FPGA implementations of two-dimensional discrete Fourier transform (2D-DFT) on large datasets that must reside off-chip in DRAM. These memory-bound large 2D-DFT computations are at the heart of important scientific computing and image processing applications. The central challenge in creating high-performance implementations is in the carefully orchestrated use of the available off-chip memory bandwidth and on-chip temporary storage. Our implementations derive their efficiency from a combined attention to both the algorithm design to enable efficient DRAM access patterns and datapath design to extract the maximum compute throughput at a given level of memory bandwidth. The poster reports results including a 1024x1024 double-precision 2D-DFT implementation on an Altera DE4 platform (based on a Stratix IV EP4SGX530 with 12 GB/s DRAM bandwidth) that reached over 16 Gflop/s, achieving a much higher ratio of performance-to-memory-bandwidth than both state-of-the-art CPU and GPU implementations.