An efficient RTL buffering scheme for an FPGA-accelerated simulation of diffuse radiative transfer

Abstract

This paper proposes the efficient buffering approach for implementing radiative transfer equations to bridge the performance gap between processing elements and HBM memory bandwidth. The radiation transfer equation originally focuses on the fundamental physics process in astrophysics. Besides, it has become the focus of a lot of attention in recent years because of the wealth of applications such as medical bioimaging. However, the acceleration requires a complicated memory access pattern with low latency, and the earlier studies unveil conventional memory access based on software control has no aptitude for this computation. Thus, this article introduced an HBM FPGA and proposed an application-specific buffering mechanism called PRISM (PRefetchable and Instantly accessible Scratchpad Memory) to efficiently bridge the computational unit and the HBM. The proposed approach was evaluated on a XILINX Alveo U280 FPGA, and the experimental results are also discussed.