The 192nd R-CCS Cafe - part 1

We have been developing FPGA Cluster in order to research new approaches for future HPC, where we rely on circuit-reconfigurable computing with data-flow based, and customized architectures. As a part of FS2020 project, we have investigated possibilities on enhancing Fugaku with other computing architectures. We focus on FPGAs, Field-Programmable Gate Arrays, which can be used to construct arbitrary circuit structure on a chip for processing elements, memory subsystems, on-chip interconnects, and external networks. A cluster of such FPGA chips gives us testbeds for new architecture researches by allowing us to construct various machines and conduct experiments with them. In this talk, I introduce the overview of this FPGA cluster project, as well as the technical details of the system from hardware to software developed very recently, what we can do with them, and the present trend of FPGAs and new CMOS-digital-based architectures for HPC and Big-data processing applications.