reconfigurable/fpga computing part 1

May 10, 2014 R.Innocente 1

Reconfigurable ComputingReconfigurable Computing

Roberto Innocente

[email protected]

Part 1 of 2

mailto:[email protected]


Flexibility

ASICApplication

SpecificIntegrated Circuit

Very inflexible,designed to solve just 1 problem.Energy, space and time

efficient

GPPGeneralPurpose

Processor

Very flexible,can solve any problem. Energy, space and time

inefficient

?

ReconfigurableHardwareFlexible,

But enough energy, time and space efficient

+-


History


Gerald Estrin/1is credited the idea of having proposed in the '60 the first reconfigurable

(F+V) FIX+Variable computer

Gerald Estrin. ACM 1960. Organization of computer systems: the fixed plus variable structure computer.


Gerald Estrin/2He envisioned that important gains in performance could be achieved when many computations are executed on appropriate problem oriented configurations.

F+V is made of :

- high speed general computer(the F part) : initially an ibm7090

- various size high speed special structures (the V part) problem specific: trigonometric functions, logarithms, exponential, n-th powers, complex arithmetic, …

V is made of a 36 module positions motherboard which can undergo :

- Function reconfiguration: physically changing some modules

- Routing reconfiguration : changing part of the back wiring

The Rammig machine (1977) : investigation of a reconfigurable machine with no manual or mechanical intervention


Today reconfigurable hardware

Is born out of the will to replace different logic IC(Integrated Circuits), and successively to rapidly prototype large ASICs(Application Specific ICs) or implement SoCs (Sytem On Chip).

In the following slides readers are supposed to be involved in scientific computing and not EE engineers.


Basic digital circuitsAND INVERTER

Shift RegD Type FFMUX

Usually 0=0V, 1=some positive voltage

OR


SSI 74xx IC


PLD

Inconvenience of standard discrete logic circuits :

- 14 pin packages of 4/6 logic functions

- often you had to traverse the PCB to find a free OR or inverter

- if you needed only a few, you had in any case to put an IC with 4/6

Therefore came the idea of PLD (Programmable Logic Device) :

- SPLD (Simple : PAL/PLA)

- CPLD (Complex)

In which a simple interconnection network could be configured melting some internal fuses (fuse technology) to implement combinatorial logic.


disjunctive normal form(aka Sum of products )

Each boolean function of some boolean variables can be represented as a sum of minterms (product of all variables or their complement) .

With 3 boolean vars : a,b,c

are 2 of the 23 = 8 minterms

f (a ,b , c)=a b c+a b c

a b c , a b c


PLA (Programmable Logic Array)

f1=p1+ p2+ p3=x1x2+x1 x3+ x1 x2 x3+x1 x3


FPGAAlso CPLDs showed their limits, therefore in 1985/1990 Xilinx introduced a more flexible design , the

FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array)

In which the interconnection network is much more flexible and on which also sequential circuits can be easily mapped.


FPGA idea1985 Xilinx – Ross Freeman (inventor of FPGA): “What if we could develop the equivalent of a circuit board full of standard logic parts (like TTL and PAL devices) on a single high density programmable logic chip ?”

- post fabrication programmability by end users

- fabless semiconductor company


Today


FPGA marketDominated by 2 players :

- Altera

- Xilinx

From 67% of 2010, today they share together 90% of the market (4.5 billion usd revenues in 2012)

From sourcetech411(2010)


An important question: are FPGAs green ?

Virtex-7 2000T (one of the top FPGAs) :

~ 20 WXilinx showed 3600 copies of its 8 bit processor nanoblaze running on Virtex-7, consuming 20 W

CPU : ~ 100 WCore i7-4770K Haswell (22 nm) 3.5 GHz@ 4 Cores 84 W

Core i7-3930K Sandybridge-E (32 nm) 3.2 GHz @6Cores 130 W

Xeon E7458 Dunnington (45 nm) 2.4 GHz 90 W

Xeon E7460 Dunnington (45 nm) 2.66 GHz 130 W

GPU : ~ 220 WNvidia Tesla M2090 225 W

Nvidia Tesla K20X 235 W

This is a partial answer. We need to be able to estimate FPGA performance to give a more useful index.


FPGA architecture

From RF and Wireless World

Sea of gates : logic blocks are like islands in a sea of interconnections


Virtex family1998 Virtex 250nm 100mhz 25k-60k cells

2000 Virtex-E 180nm 300mhz 1k-70kcells

2000 Virtex II 150nm to168 mult420mhzupto 93k 4-luts

2005 Virtex-4 90nm 500mhz upto 200k cells

2007 Virtex-5 65nm 550mhz up to 330k cells

Virtex-6 40nm 288-2k DSP to 500k 6-luts

2010 Virtex-7 28nm ~500mhz upto 2000k cells

2014 Virtex-US 20 nm upto 4400k cells

From L Zhuo

Up to ~ 7 billion transistorIntel 2014 15-core Xeon IvyBridge-EX~ 4.3 billion transistorNvidia 2012 GK110 Kepler ~ 7 billion transistor


FPGA/CPU evolution


Virtex-7 is not monolithic

2.5 D technology : 4 FPGA tiles with silicon interposer that provides 10kInterconeections between layers


Enabling technologies


Programming technology/1

Antifuse SRAM

OTP(One time programmable)

Disordered except at very low range

Pass transistor in switch block


Programming technology/2Antifuse

-pros:

cheap, small

-cons:

requires special processing, One time programming

SRAM

-pros:

can be deployed with standard semiconductor process, can be easily reprogrammed

-cons:

large area required(6 transistors)


ConfwareThe configuration of an FPGA ( that becomes compiled to a stream of bits) is not hardware, nor software.

Someone invented the neologism

confware

The configuration of a reconfigurable hardware.


How you configure an FPGA ?

SRAM cells as a long shift register : loaded serially clocking in the confwareVirtex 7 2000T = 440 Mbits of SRAM cells(simplified : large fpgas can also parallel load the confware)


Logic Blocks/Logic Cells


Fine/coarse grain logic blocksFrom :

- a single transistor (Crosspoint : went in bankrupcy)

- a logic gate

To :

- a complete processor (FPNA: field programmable node arrays)

NB. FPNA is also field programmable neural array


Homogeneous :

- Logic Cells: 4 input LUT(LookUp Table) + FlipFlop

Heterogeneous(modern development) :

- Logic cells

- DSP (Digital Signal Processing)

- Memory blocks

- I/O blocks

The heterogenous architecture is prevalent now. The blocks are configured by SRAM bits usually loaded trough serial ports as already pointed out.

CLB(Configurable Logic Blocks)

Necessary differentiation to allow things like multiplication/addition to be mapped in an efficient way.


Standard Logic Cell

4 input LUT

D type FlipFlop

16 bits of SRAM for conf 1 bit SRAM conf

2:1 Mux


standard LUT (Look Up Table)

0 0000 0

1 0001 1

2 0010 0

3 0011 0

4 0100 1

5 0101 0

6 0110 1

7 0111 1

.. .. ..

Dec Bin Out- 16 x 1 memory

- any boolean function of 4 inputs :

Bit 0

Bit 1

Bit 2

Bit 3

f = x3 x2 x1 x0+ x3 x2 x1 x0+ x3 x2 x1 x0+ x3 x2 x1 x0

NB. LUT rhymes with nut


Uses of Logic Cell2^4 = 16 x 1 bit memory Any boolean function of 4

inputs

4:1 multiplexer


Virtex-7 Logic Block basics


Virtex-7 Logic sliceFrom Xilinx

4 x 32=128 bit shift reg


Virtex7 CLB slice- 6-input LUT

- 2 5-input LUTs with same inputs

- 2 arbitrary boolean function on 3-input and 2-input or less


Altera ALM


Interconnection network


Interconnection networkHierarchical routing Island type routing(predominant)

Interconnection network can consume 80% of the area of an FPGA !

Nearest neighbours


Programmable switch


SRAM routing: coarse/fine grain5 bit SRAM 1 bit SRAM


Details of island type routing


Disjoint/Wilton switch blocks

Disjoint : wire can only go out on wire of same number, creates routing domainsWilton : can change domain in at least one directions


Channel segments distribution


Columnar architecture7 series Xilinx fpgaColumnar architecture


DSP blocks &floating point


FPGAs floating point in 1994

B. Fagin and C. Renard. Field Programmable Gate Arrays and Floating Point Arithmetic. IEEE Transactions on VLSI Systems, 2(3), September 1994.

Fagin & Renard report that you can implement floating point operators but it is impractical : no

FPGA in existence could contain a single multiplier circuit !!


FPGA fp in 1995Shirazi & al. On the same line of Fagin & Renard propose 2 custom fp formats 16 and 18 bits total:

they provide for them add,sub, mul, div operators

N. Shirazi, A. Walters, and P. Athanas. Quantitative Analysis of Floating Point Arithmetic on FPGA Based Custom Computing Machines. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on FPGAs for Custom Computing Machines, April 1995.


FPGA fp in 2002Belanovic & Leeser present a library of variable width parameterized floating point operators (superset of the ieee formats)

A Library of Parameterized Floating-point Modules and Their UsePavle Belanovic and Miriam Leeser, 2002


What allowed the breakthrough ?The addition, by major vendors, of hardware multipliers (called DSP blocks) on their FPGA from 2000 on :

- 1st Xilinx on Virtex II

- soon after Altera on Stratix

This started in the last decade also the interest of HPC community :

Cray XD1, Silicon RASC, Convey HC1

HPRC = High Performance Reconfigurable Computing


FPGA MAC operation


Virtex-7 DSP48 high level

From Xilinx

1 bit 2 bit


DSP48E1 details


Altera Stratix V DSP block

4 (*) + 3(+) = 7 flop


Data Flow Graphs (DFG)


Data flowA representation of a program as a DG(Directed Graph) in which the nodes are the operations and the edges represent the data dependencies from one operation to the next


Control flow/Data Flow

dis2=b**2-4*a*c

If dis2 < 0 complex!

dis=sqrt(dis2)

u1=-b/(2*a)

u2=dis/(2*a)

x1=u1+u2

x2=u1-u2x=

−b2a

±√b2−4ac

2a


A scalar productFortran :

acc=0.0

do i=1,4

acc=acc+a(i)*b(i)

enddo

C :

acc=0.0;

for(i=0;i<4;i++){

acc=acc+a[i]*b[i];

}


Time/Space tradeoffs


Systolic array matrix multA(n,n) x B(n,n) requires :2n-1 steps for the last elements to enter the arrayn-1 steps to compute the last c(n,n)n steps to move the result out = 4n-2 steps


Codesign

The implementation of algorithms on FPGAs requires a mix of hw and sw design :

Codesign = hw design + sw design


How to program FPGAs?Mainly with an HDL (Hardware Description Language):

- Verilog(intially developed by Gateway Design Automation, now a std)

- VHDL (out of a standard committee)

But OpenCL, ImpulseC, SystemC, C, Handel-C translators .. are also available.Is this a good idea ?

The problem is that those languages are not thought for describing hardware and the translation finish up usually with a FSM(finite state machine) with 1 state for every statement and then the FSM machine moves along the states .

This is not the way someone skilled would program the FPGA.

Next statelogic

Stateregister

Output Logic

input

clk

D Q

Out

FSM finite state machine


FPGA will winFor many years FPGAs were just prototyping vehicles for ASICs

– Now they are replacing many ASICS & ASSPs

– Watch for the same Trojan effect with FPGAs in HPC


End of part 1 of 2

reconfigurable/fpga computing part 1

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