Professor Viktor Prasanna at ECE Fall 2024 Colloquium

FPGA Accelerators in the Cloud

With recent dramatic advances in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), these devices are being used along with multi-core and novel memory technologies to realize advanced platforms to accelerate applications in the Cloud. We will review advances in reconfigurable computing over the past 25 years leading up to accelerators for data science. We will illustrate FPGA-based parallel architectures and algorithms for a variety of data analytics kernels in streaming graph processing and graph machine learning. While demonstrating algorithm-architecture co-design methodology to realize high performance accelerators for graphs and machine learning, we demonstrate the role of modeling and algorithmic optimizations to develop highly efficient Intellectual Property (IP) cores for FPGAs. We show improved performance for two broad classes of graph analytics: iterative graph algorithms with variable workload (e. g., graph traversal, shortest paths, etc.) and machine learning on graphs (e. g., graph embedding). For variable workload iterative graph algorithms, we illustrate dynamic algorithm adaptation to exploit heterogeneity in the architecture. We conclude by identifying opportunities and challenges in exploiting emerging heterogeneous architectures composed of multi-core processors, FPGAs, GPUs, NPUs and coherent memory.