Tinsel: a manythread overlay for FPGA clusters

Abstract

Commodity FPGA boards with advanced networking facilities have great potential in the construction of high-performance compute clusters that scale. However, low-level design tools and long synthesis times are major barriers to productivity for application developers. In this paper, we explore the potential of a distributed soft-processor overlay, programmed in software at a high-level of abstraction, to deliver a useful level of performance for FPGA clusters. In particular, we demonstrate the use of hardware multhreading to achieve a fast, space-efficient, high-throughput overlay, and compare a 12-FPGA instance of it (12,288 RISC-V threads) against a conventional Xeon cluster on the problem of distributed graph processing.