Cube: A 512-FPGA cluster

Author

Mencer, Oskar ; Tsoi, Kuen Hung ; Craimer, Stephen ; Todman, Timothy ; Luk, Wayne ; Wong, Ming Yee ; Leong, Philip Heng Wai

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput., Imperial Coll. London, London

fYear

2009

fDate

1-3 April 2009

Firstpage

51

Lastpage

57

Abstract

Cube, a massively-parallel FPGA-based platform is presented. The machine is made from boards each containing 64 FPGA devices and eight boards can be connected in a cube structure for a total of 512 FPGA devices. With high bandwidth systolic inter-FPGA communication and a flexible programming scheme, the result is a low power, high density and scalable supercomputing machine suitable for various large scale parallel applications. A RC4 key search engine was built as an demonstration application. In a fully implemented Cube, the engine can perform a full search on the 40-bit key space within 3 minutes, this being 359 times faster than a multi-threaded software implementation running on a 2.5 GHz Intel Quad-Core Xeon processor.

Keywords

field programmable gate arrays; parallel machines; 512-FPGA cluster; Cube; RC4 key search engine; flexible programming; high bandwidth systolic interFPGA communication; massively-parallel FPGA-based platform; supercomputing machine; Application software; Costs; Field programmable gate arrays; Hardware; Large-scale systems; Parallel programming; Pipelines; Prototypes; Radio access networks; Search engines;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Programmable Logic, 2009. SPL. 5th Southern Conference on

Conference_Location

Sao Carlos

Print_ISBN

978-1-4244-3847-1

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/SPL.2009.4914907

Filename

4914907