Performance evaluation of Stratix V DE5-Net FPGA board for high performance computing

FPGA, or Field Programmable Gate Array, has been widely used for several applications such as digital signal and image processing, video processing, software-defined radio, radar processing, medical imaging and so on. Currently, with the significance growth of parallel computing and cloud computing application, FPGA provides another solution for high performance computing instead of CPU or GPGPU due to its hardware parallelism and low power consuming. We have been developing the heterogeneous high performance computing that utilize the FPGA as well as GPU. One of the implemented FPGA boards for this purpose is Stratix V FPGA from Altera. In this paper, we performed the test and computation using OpenCL to evaluate the performance of Stratix V DE5-Net FPGA board. The results showed that the maximum performance achieved 6.4 GBytes/s and 81 GFlops for PCIe throughput and 1-D FFT computation performance respectively.

I. Introduction

Recently, so many applications ranging from scientific data calculation, intensive simulation in academic and industrial application, business prediction and calculation until data management in government institution require high performance computing. Implementing the high performance computing, or HPC for short, is very fast and efficient. However, those infrastructure consume more energy [1]. It is estimated that by 2020 there will be growth and scale investment in cloud computing. The increase is 50-fold in the amount of digital information. This rapid increase comes from global companies such as Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Yahoo which consume tremendous amount of electricity [2].