Harnessing the Power of FPGAs with the Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL™

Abstract

In this tutorial, we will introduce you to the reconfigurable hardware architecture and programming of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). You will learn why FPGAs have become so popular in recent years, and understand the many advantages of using FPGAs in your HPC application. In particular, we will cover architectural features of FPGAs that make them well suited to many complex operations, including matrix multiplications and convolutions. In addition, we will introduce you to programming FPGAs using the Intel FPGA SDK for OpenCL™, and how specific OpenCL coding techniques can lead to efficient circuits implemented on the FPGA. Finally, we will go over several case studies where FPGAs have shown very competitive performance when programmed using OpenCL, including convolutional neural nets, FFTs, and astronomy de-dispersion algorithms.