On December 2, 2020, the 4th SFB 901 seminar in the winter semester will take place.
4:00 - 5:00 subproject C2
Speakers: Prof. Dr. Christian Plessl + Marius Meyer
Title: Multi-FPGA Clusters with Hybrid Networks: Foundations and Potential for OTF Applications
The talk will be held via BigBlueButton.
Abstract:
Subproject C2 investigates the use of heterogeneous computing nodes with hardware accelerators based on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) in OTF compute centers. FPGAs have found increasing adoption in data center applications since they offer considerable performance and energy-efficiency advantages over CPUs. Additionally, a new generation of high-level tools has become available which noticeably reduce development time for FPGA boards and still provide high-quality results. Together with the emerging support of inter-FPGA communication in recent high-end FPGA boards, this offers additional opportunities to scale and deploy OTF workloads on multi-FPGA clusters. However, there are substantial differences in the architecture of the FPGA boards as well as the inter-FPGA networks which highly affect the performance of these workloads. In a first step, benchmarks are implemented and used to characterize the performance of common data center applications on this novel infrastructure. The results can then serve as a base to create more precise application models and enhance the deployment strategies of OTF services for multi-FPGA clusters.