A Custom Hardware Architecture for the Link Assessment Problem

Abstract

AbstractHeterogeneous accelerator enhanced computing architectures are a common solution in embedded computing, mainly due to the constraints in energy and power efficiency. Such accelerator enhanced systems dispatch data- and computing-intensive tasks to specialized, optimized and thus efficient hardware units, leaving most control flow tasks for the more generic but less efficient central processing units (CPUs). Nowadays, also high-performance computing (HPC) systems are becoming more heterogeneous by incorporating accelerators into the computing nodes.In this chapter, we introduce the concept of heterogeneous computing and present the design of a hardware accelerator for solving the Link Assessment (LA) problem, in introduced Chapter 3. The hardware accelerator integrates its main dedicated processing units with a customized cache design and light-weight data path. We provide detailed area, energy, and timing results for a 28 nm application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) process and DDR3 memory devices. Compared to an CPU-based cluster, our proposed solution uses 38x less memory and is 1030x more energy efficient for processing a users-movies dataset with half a million edges.