Exploring portability and performance of OpenCL FPGA kernels on intel HARPV2

FPGAs offer a heterogenous compute solution to the continuous desire for increased performance by enabling the creation of application-specific hardware that accelerates computation. While the barrier to entry has historically been steep, advances in High Level Synthesis (HLS) are making FPGAs more accessible. Specifically, the Intel FPGA OpenCL SDK allows software designers to abstract away low level details of architecting hardware on an FPGA and allows them to author computational kernels in a higher level language. Furthermore, Intel has developed a system that incorporates both a multicore Xeon CPU and Arria 10 FPGA into the same chip package as part of the Heterogeneous Accelerator Research Program (HARP) that can be targeted by their SDK. In this work, we target the second iteration of the HARP platform (HARPv2) using HLS through porting of OpenCL kernels originally written for FPGAs connected via a PCIe bus. We evaluate the HARPv2 system’s performance against previously reported results, explore the portability of kernels through a hardware design space search, and empirically show the benefits of using the shared virtual memory (SVM) abstraction over explicit reads and writes.