A Case for FPGA Based Accelerated Communication

The use of Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) in the area of High Performance Computing (HPC) to accelerate computations is well known. We present here a case where FPGAs can be used to speed up communication instead of computation. Current interconnects for HPC are in particular missing support for fine grain communication, which is increasingly found in various applications. In order to overcome this situation we developed a novel custom network. By using solely FPGAs it can easily be reconfigured to custom needs. The main drawback of FPGAs is their limited performance, which is about one to two orders of magnitude slower than commercial (specialized) solutions. However, an architecture optimized for small packet sizes results in a performance superior even to commercial high performance solutions. This excellent communication performance is verified by results from several popular benchmarks. In summary, we present a case where FPGAs can be used to accelerate communication and outperform commercial interconnection networks for HPC.