Convey HC-1 -- The Potential of FPGAs in Numerical Simulation

The Convey HC-1 Hybrid Core Computer brings FPGA technologies closer to numerical simulation. It combines two types of processor architectures in a single system. Highly capable FPGAs are closely connected to a host CPU and the accelerator-to-memory bandwidth has remarkable values. Reconfigurability by means of pre-defined application-specific instruction sets called personalities have the appeal of optimized hardware configuration with respect to application characteristics. Moreover, Conveyś solution eases the programming effort considerably. In contrast to hardware-centric and time- consuming classical coding of FPGAs, a dual-target compiler interprets pragma-extended C/C++ or Fortran code and produces implementations running on both, host and accelerator. In addition, a global view of host and device memory is provided by means of a cache-coherent shared virtual memory space. In this work we analyze Convey's programming paradigm and the associated programming effort, and we present practical results on the HC-1. We consider vectorization strategies for the single and double precision vector personalities and a suite of basic numerical routines. Furthermore, we assess the viability of the Convey HC-1 Hybrid Core Computer for numerical simulation.