IMPLEMENTATION OF MIDDLE PRODUCT ALGORITHM ON LINEAR PROCESSOR ARRAYS

Abstract

This paper presents the design, implementation and performance evaluation of the linear processor array accelerator for matrix multiplication. We call it matrix multiplication processor (MMP). The MMP is composed of n processing elements (PEs) connected in a chain, distributed memory, and dedicated address generator unit (AGU) to generate memory addresses. By using this approach, address generation does not increase the processing time. The AGU is one major difference in the proposed architecture compared to graphics processing units (GPUs) that use ALUs to create addresses. MMP is based on FPGA technology since this circuits possess extreme degree of parallelism and ability to customize the RAM and data path architecture to the computation. We have considered performance metrics of the proposed architecture in the sense of number of PEs, execution time, speedup, efficiency and gain factor. We have implemented AGU and PE in Xilinx Spartan 2E FPGAs using ISE 9.01 as a software tool. We compare our design with respect to the execution time, number of PEs, AT measure, speedup and efficiency with other solutions proposed in the literature.