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by RandomOpinion 3440 days ago
>What does one do with such a cluster?

They presented a short paper at FCCM '16: http://fpga.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/grvi_phalanx_fccm... Section VI lists possible applications.

1 comments

For the lazy like me:

"GRVI Phalanx aspires to make it easier to develop and maintain an FPGA accelerator for a parallel software workload. Some workloads will fit its mold, i.e. highly parallel SPMD or MIMD code with small kernels, local shared memory, and global message passing. Here are some parallel models that should map fairly well to a GRVI Phalanx framework:

• OpenCL kernels: run each work group on a cluster;

• ‘Gatling gun’ parallel packet processing: send each new packet to an idle cluster, which may exclusively work on that packet for up to (#clusters) packet-time-periods.

• OpenMP/TBB: run MIMD tasks within a cluster;

• Streaming data through process networks: pass streams as messages within a cluster, or between clusters;

• Compositions of such models.

Since GRVI Phalanx is implemented in an FPGA, these and other parallel models may then be further accelerated via custom GRVI and cluster function units; custom memories and interconnects; and custom standalone accelerator cores on cluster RAM or directly connected on the NOC."