an Extensible Heterogeneous Multi-FPGA Framework for Accelerating N-body Simulation (Abstract Only)

N-body simulation plays a significant role in scientific research and engineering development. Direct-summation N-body algorithms compute the particle interaction in an exact way, but this algorithm have a computational complexity of $O(N^2)$. To simulate a large system efficiently and flexibly, lots of high performance implementations on FPGA have been developed.

We propose an extensible framework for heterogeneous multi-FPGA based direct-summation N-body simulation and a model to decompose workload among FPGAs. In the framework, we try to use existing FPGA boards rather than design new specialized boards to reduce cost. It can be expanded conveniently with any available FPGA board and only requires quite low communication bandwidth between FPGA boards. The communication protocol is simple and can be implemented with limited hardware/software resource. For the purpose of improving the system's performance, the model divide workload based on the logic resource, memory access bandwidth and communication bandwidth of each FPGA chip. We implemented this framework in a numerical simulation project about MOND (Modified Newtonian dynamics), and achieved two orders of magnitude speedup compared with CPU implementations.