Zedwulf: Power-Performance Tradeoffs of a 32-Node Zynq SoC Cluster

Commodity SoCs with hybrid architectures that combine CPUs with programmable FPGA fabric such as the Xilinx Zynq SoC have become a competitive energy-efficient platform for addressing irregular parallelism in graph problems. In this paper, we prototype a 32-node cluster composed from these Zynq SoC...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Moorthy, Pradeep, Kapre, Nachiket
Other Authors: School of Computer Engineering
Format: Conference or Workshop Item
Language:English
Published: 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://hdl.handle.net/10356/83649
http://hdl.handle.net/10220/39205
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Institution: Nanyang Technological University
Language: English
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Summary:Commodity SoCs with hybrid architectures that combine CPUs with programmable FPGA fabric such as the Xilinx Zynq SoC have become a competitive energy-efficient platform for addressing irregular parallelism in graph problems. In this paper, we prototype a 32-node cluster composed from these Zynq SoC chips to accelerate communication-bound sparse graph-oriented applications such as neural network simulations. We develop specialized MPI routines specifically developed for irregular accelerator-to-accelerator communication of small message traffic. We use the ARM processor for handling the MPI stack while offloading compute-intensive calculations to the FPGA. For graphs with 32M nodes and 32M edges, Zedwulf delivers the highest 94 MTEPS (Million Traversed Edges Per Second)throughput over other x86 multi-threaded platforms in our study by 1.2 -- 1.4×. For this experiment, Zedwulf operates at an efficiency of 0.49 MTEPS/W when using ARM+FPGA which is1.2× better than using ARMv7 CPUs alone, and within 8% of the Intel Core i7-4770k platform.