Rapid development of high performance floating-point pipelines for scientific simulation

Abstract

In the last years, FPGAs became capable of performing complex floating-point based calculations. For many applications, highly parallel calculation units can be implemented which deliver a better performance than general-purpose processors. This paper focuses on applications where the calculations can be done in a pipeline, as it is often the case for simulations. A framework for rapid design of such calculation pipelines is described. The central part is a Perl based code generator, which automatically assembles floating-point operators into synthesizable hardware description code where the generator is directed by a pipeline description file. The framework is supplemented by various floating-point operators and support modules, which allow generating ready-to-use pipelines. The code generator dramatically reduces development time and produces high-quality results. The performance of the framework is demonstrated by the implementation of pipelines for gravitational forces and hydrodynamics.