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What is next for accelerators? Turf war or collaboration? . Stefan Möhl, Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer, Mitrionics. Modern Hardware Accelerators. Modern Accelerators are COTS The main problem for HW accelerators in the past was the follow-on version
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What is next for accelerators? Turf war or collaboration? Stefan Möhl, Co-Founder, Chief Strategy Officer, Mitrionics
Modern Hardware Accelerators • Modern Accelerators are COTS • The main problem for HW accelerators in the past was the follow-on version • COTS guarantees next-generation support • COTS Accelerators Today: • FPGAs (The part we do) • GPGPUs • Many-Core CPUs (Intel, AMD, STI Cell)
Which Accelerator to Choose? FPGAs, GPGPUs or Many-Core?
GPGPUs • Advantages • Very high off-chip bandwidth (80+ GB/s) • High performance on DP-FP (250 peak GFLOPS) • Good price/performance • Disadvantages • Errors (lack of ECC and full IEEE-fp support) • Heat • Not x86 compatible
FPGAs • Advantages • High off-chip bandwidth (20+ GB/s) • 0.5 TB/s to on-chip memories • HW acceleration on any operation • Very high performance on non FP add/mul • Low power (20 Watts) • Good price/performance • Disadvantages • High unit cost • Not x86 compatible
Many-Core CPUs • Advantages • Runs legacy code (at least on one core) • Runs full applications • Needed by other accelerators for Amdahl’s Law • A very fast device is needed to churn through the millions of lines of code that are not in the hot-spot! • Disadvantages • Baseline performance • Heat • Runs legacy code slowly
Many-core CPUs Command & Control FPGAsNon-Floating Point GPGPUs Floating Point Heterogeneous Computing
Will the world go Heterogeneous? • The Big Guys have made the choice • AMD + ATI = AMD Fusion • Heterogeneous chip with GPGPU + Many-core CPU • Intel are already the largest manufacturer of Graphics HW • Intel Quick-path/AMD Hypertransport • In-socket FPGAs directly on the system bus • Possible to add Cache-coherency and TLB • Accelerators have gone COTS • Will stay around, if used in HPC or not • Legacy code must be fine-grain parallelized • For Many-Core, GPGPU and FPGA alike
The HPC FPGA Eco-System App’s & Algo’s Bioinformatics, Text search, Financials, etc MVP & SDK HW Module suppliers System vendor CPU/FPGA suppliers
The Mitrion Platform 1) The Mitrion Virtual Processor • A configurable processor design for a fine-grain massively parallel, soft-core processor • 10-30 times faster than traditional CPUs at 20-25 Watts • Executes a program in an FPGA 2) The Mitrion-C programming language • An intrinsically parallel C-family language 3) The Mitrion Software Development Kit • Compiler • Debugger/Simulator • Processor configurator
Thank You! Mitrionics AB Ideon Science Park SE-223 70 Lund www.mitrionics.com stefan@mitrionics.com