FPGA-Based Computational Fluid Dynamics Simulation Architecture via High-Level Synthesis Design Method

Abstract

Today’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) systems often use GPUs as dedicated hardware accelerators to meet the computation requirements of applications such as neural networks, genetic decoding, and hydrodynamic simulations. Meanwhile, FPGAs have also been considered as alternative suitable hardware accelerators due to their advancing computational capabilities and low power consumption. Moreover, the developments of High-Level Synthesis (HLS) allow users to generate FPGA designs directly from mainstream languages, e.g., C, C++, and OpenCL. However, writing efficient high-level programs with good performance is still a time-consuming task, and the lack of knowledge about FPGA architecture can lead to poor scalability and portability. In this paper, we propose an architecture design for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations based on the HLS method. Our design can adjust the performance by utilizing the parallelism inside both temporal and spatial domains of CFD simulations. We also discuss the data reuse buffer optimization choices while considering the potability of HLS codes. A performance model is introduced to guide the design space exploration under the constraints of available resources on FPGA. We evaluate our design via a Xilinx VCU1525 FPGA board and compare the results with other state-of-the-art studies. Experiment results show that VCU1525 can achieve 629.6 GFLOP/s in D2Q9 LBM-BGK model and the design and optimization methods can be used for developing various CFD applications.