FPGA has been an emerging computing infrastructure in datacenters benefiting from fine-grained parallelism, energy efficiency, and reconfigurability. Meanwhile, graph processing has attracted tremendous interest in data analytics, and its performance is in increasing demand with the rapid growth of data. Many works have been proposed to tackle the challenges of designing efficient FPGA-based accelerators for graph processing. However, the largely overlooked programmability still requires hardware design expertise and sizable development efforts from developers. ThunderGP , an HLS-based graph processing framework on FPGAs, is hence proposed to close the gap, with which developers could enjoy high performance of FPGA-accelerated graph processing by writing only a few high-level functions with no knowledge of the hardware. ThunderGP adopts the gather-apply-scatter (GAS) model as the abstraction of various graph algorithms and realizes the model by a build-in highly parallel and memory-efficient accelerator template. With high-level functions as inputs, ThunderGP automatically explores massive resources of multiple super-logic regions (SLRs) of modern FPGA platforms to generate and deploy accelerators, as well as schedule tasks for them. While ThunderGP on DRAM-based platforms is memory bandwidth bounded, recent high bandwidth memory (HBM) brings large potentials to performance. However, the system bottleneck shifts from memory bandwidth to resource consumption on HBM-enabled platforms. Therefore, we further propose to improve resource efficiency of ThunderGP to utilize more memory bandwidth from HBM. We conduct evaluation with seven common graph applications and nineteen graphs. ThunderGP on DRAM-based hardware platforms provides 1.9 × ∼ 5.2 × improvement on bandwidth efficiency over the state-of-the-art, while ThunderGP on HBM-based hardware platforms delivers up to 5.2 × speedup over the state-of-the-art RTL-based approach. This work is open-sourced on Github at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/ThunderGP.

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In this paper, we propose ThundeRiNG, a resource-efficient and high-throughput system for generating multiple independent sequences of random numbers (MISRN) on FPGAs. Generating MISRN can be a time-consuming step in many applications such as numeric computation and approximate computing. Despite that decades of studies on generating a single sequence of random numbers on FPGAs have achieved very high throughput and high quality of randomness, existing MISRN approaches either suffer from heavy resource consumption or fail to achieve statistical independence among sequences. In contrast, ThundeRiNG resolves the dependence by using a resource-efficient decorrelator among multiple sequences, guaranteeing a high statistical quality of randomness. Moreover, ThundeRiNG develops a novel state sharing among a massive number of pseudo-random number generator instances on FPGAs. The experimental results show that ThundeRiNG successfully passes the widely used statistical test, TestU01, only consumes a constant number of DSPs (less than 1% of the FPGA resource capacity) for generating any number of sequences, and achieves a throughput of 655 billion random numbers per second. Compared to the state-of-the-art GPU library, ThundeRiNG demonstrates a 10.62× speedup on MISRN and delivers up to 9.15× performance and 26.63× power efficiency improvement on two applications ( estimation and Monte Carlo option pricing). This work is open-sourced on Github at https://github.com/Xtra-Computing/ThundeRiNG.

The use of FPGAs for efficient graph processing has attracted significant interest. Recent memory subsystem upgrades including the introduction of HBM in FPGAs promise to further alleviate memory bottlenecks. However, modern multi-channel HBM requires much more processing pipelines to fully utilize its bandwidth potential. Existing designs do not scale well, resulting in underutilization of the HBM facilities even when all other resources are fully consumed.In this paper, we re-examined the graph processing workloads and found much diversity in processing. We also found that the diverse workloads can be easily classified into two types, namely dense and sparse partitions. This motivates us to propose a resource-efficient heterogeneous pipeline architecture. Our heterogeneous architecture comprises of two types of pipelines: Little pipelines to process dense partitions with good locality and Big pipelines to process sparse partitions with extremely poor locality. Unlike traditional monolithic pipeline designs, the heterogeneous pipelines are tailored for more specific memory access patterns, and hence are more lightweight, allowing the architecture to scale up more effectively with limited resources. In addition, we propose a model-guided task scheduling method that schedules partitions to the right pipeline types, generates the most efficient pipeline combination and balances workloads. Furthermore, we develop an automated open-source framework, called ReGraph 1 , which automates the entire development process. ReGraph outperforms state-of-the-art FPGA accelerators by up to 5.9× in terms of performance and 12× in terms of resource efficiency.