Acceleration of ART Algorithm on an FPGA Board with Xilinx SDAccel

Radiation transfer (RT) is an important physical processes of energy transfer in the form of electromagnetic wave, and ART method is a ray-tracing for computing RT of re-connected photons in the simulation of protogalaxies formation. It requires a heavy computational power and complicated memory accesses which are not suitable to acceleration with GPUs. Here, for the future use of FPGA-in-Cloud, the acceleration of ART method with SDAccel on Xilinx's cost efficient FPGA board KCU1500 was tried. Although the execution time was not reduced compared with the host CPU with various combination of derivatives, the energy consumption was reduced to 1/3.35.