FPGA-Based Near-Memory Acceleration of Modern Data-Intensive Applications

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that FPGA-based near-memory computing with high-bandwidth memory significantly improves performance and energy efficiency for data-intensive applications like genome analysis and weather prediction.

Contribution

It introduces the use of FPGA with HBM for near-memory acceleration, showing substantial speedups and energy savings over traditional systems.

Findings

Large speedups over IBM POWER9 system

Significant energy savings compared to DDR4-based FPGA

Effective acceleration of genome analysis and weather kernels

Abstract

Modern data-intensive applications demand high computation capabilities with strict power constraints. Unfortunately, such applications suffer from a significant waste of both execution cycles and energy in current computing systems due to the costly data movement between the computation units and the memory units. Genome analysis and weather prediction are two examples of such applications. Recent FPGAs couple a reconfigurable fabric with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to enable more efficient data movement and improve overall performance and energy efficiency. This trend is an example of a paradigm shift to near-memory computing. We leverage such an FPGA with high-bandwidth memory (HBM) for improving the pre-alignment filtering step of genome analysis and representative kernels from a weather prediction model. Our evaluation demonstrates large speedups and energy savings over a high-end IBM POWER9 system and a conventional FPGA board with DDR4 memory. We conclude that FPGA-based near-memory computing has the potential to alleviate the data movement bottleneck for modern data-intensive applications.