Accelerating Calculations on the RASC Platform: A Case Study of the Exponential Function

摘要

This paper presents results of the tests performed to determine high speed calculations capabilities of the SGI RASC platform. Different data transfer modes and memory management approaches were examined to choose the most effective combination of the Host and RASC memory adjustments. Obtained results of measurements revealed that Direct I/O mode together with DMA transfer provides the highest data throughput between the Host and RASC slice. Nevertheless, for some application multi-buffering may appear to be more suitable in terms of concurrent data transfer capabilities and FPGA algorithm execution. As an example of calculation to be accelerated the exponent function is taken for which computation speed is far beyond data transfer capability of the RASC platform.