the potential for a gpu-like overlay architecture for fpgas潜在的fpga gpu-like覆盖架构.pdfVIP

Hindawi Publishing Corporation International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing Volume 2011, Article ID 514581, 15 pages doi:10.1155/2011/514581 Research Article The Potential for a GPU-Like Overlay Architecture for FPGAs Jeffrey Kingyens and J. Gregory Steffan The Edward S. Rogers Sr. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada M5S 3G4 Correspondence should be addressed to J. Gregory Steffan, steffan@ Received 3 August 2010; Accepted 27 December 2010 Academic Editor: Aravind Dasu Copyright © 2011 J. Kingyens and J. G. Steffan. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We propose a soft processor programming model and architecture inspired by graphics processing units (GPUs) that are well- matched to the strengths of FPGAs, namely, highly parallel and pipelinable computation. In particular, our soft processor architecture exploits multithreading, vector operations, and predication to supply a floating-point pipeline of 64 stages via hardware support for up to 256 concurrent thread contexts. The key new contributions of our architecture are mechanisms for managing threads and register files that maximize data-level and instruction-level parallelism while overcoming the challenges of port limitations of FPGA block memories as well as memory and pipeline latency. Through simulation of a system that (i) is programmable via NVIDIA’s high-level  language, (ii) supports AMD’s CTM r5xx GPU ISA, and (iii) is realizable on an XtremeData XD1000 FPGA-based accelerator system, we demonstrate the potential for such a system to achie