A unified OpenCL-flavor programming model with scalable hybrid hardware platform on FPGAs

Hardware accelerators are capable of achieving significant performance improvement. However, designing hardware accelerators lacks the flexibility and the productivity. Combining hardware accelerators with multiprocessor system-on-chip (MPSoC) is an alternative way to balance the flexibility, the productivity, and the performance. In this work, we present a unified hybrid OpenCL-flavor (HOpenCL) parallel programming model on MPSoC supporting both hardware and software kernels. By integrating the HOpenCL hardware IPs and software libraries, the same kernel function can execute as either hardware kernels on the dedicated hardware accelerators or software kernels on the general-purpose processors. Using the automatic design flow, the corresponding hybrid hardware platform is generated along with the executable. We use the matrix multiplication of 512×512 to examine the potential of our hybrid system in terms of performance, scalability, and productivity. The results show that hardware kernels reach more than 10 times speedup compared with the software kernels. Our prototype platform also demonstrates a good performance scalability when the number of group computation units (GCUs) increases from 1 to 6 until it becomes a memory bound problem. Compared with the hard ARM core on the Zynq 7045 device, we find that the performance of one ARM core is equivalent to 2 or 3 GCUs with software kernel implementations. On the other hand, a single GCU with hardware kernel implementation is 5 times faster than the ARM core.