Paper Info
Title
A Case for Work-stealing on FPGAs with OpenCL Atomics.
Abstract
We provide a case study of work-stealing, a popular method for run-time load balancing, on FPGAs. Following the Cederman-Tsigas implementation for GPUs, we synchronize work-items not with locks, mutexes or critical sections, but instead with the atomic operations provided by Altera's OpenCL SDK. We evaluate work-stealing for FPGAs by synthesizing a K-means clustering algorithm on an Altera P385 D5 board, both with work-stealing and with a statically-partitioned load. When block RAM utilization is maximised in both cases, we find that work-stealing leads to a 1.5x speedup. This demonstrates that the ability to do load balancing at run-time can outweigh the drawback of using `expensive' atomics on FPGAs. We hope that our case study will stimulate further research into the high-level synthesis of fine-grained, lock-free, concurrent programs.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2847263.2847343
ACM/SIGDA International Symposium on Field-Programmable Gate Arrays
Keywords
Field
DocType
atomic operations, high-level synthesis, K-means clustering, load balancing, lock-free synchronization, parallelism
k-means clustering,Synchronization,Load balancing (computing),Computer science,Parallel computing,High-level synthesis,Field-programmable gate array,Real-time computing,Work stealing,Cluster analysis,Embedded system,Speedup
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
15
0.69
13
Authors
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Nadesh Ramanathan1193.84
John Wickerson2357.17
Felix Winterstein3948.00
George A. Constantinides41391160.26