Accelerating BLAS on Custom Architecture through Algorithm-Architecture Co-design
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Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms (BLAS) play key role in high performance and scientific computing applications. Experimentally, yesteryear multicore and General Purpose Graphics Processing Units (GPGPUs) are capable of achieving up to 15 to 57 for compute bound operations like Double/Single Precision General Matrix Multiplication (XGEMM). For bandwidth bound operations like Single/Double precision Matrix-vector Multiplication (XGEMV) the performance is merely 5 to 7 Achieving performance in BLAS requires moving away from conventional wisdom and evolving towards customized accelerator tailored for BLAS through algorithm-architecture co-design. In this paper, we present acceleration of Level-1 (vector operations), Level-2 (matrix-vector operations), and Level-3 (matrix-matrix operations) BLAS through algorithm architecture co-design on a Coarse-grained Reconfigurable Architecture (CGRA). We choose REDEFINE CGRA as a platform for our experiments since REDEFINE can be adapted to support domain of interest through tailor-made Custom Function Units (CFUs). For efficient sequential realization of BLAS, we present design of a Processing Element (PE) and perform micro-architectural enhancements in the PE to achieve up-to 74 the theoretical peak performance of PE in DGEMM, 40 precision inner product (DDOT). We attach this PE to REDEFINE CGRA as a CFU and show the scalability of our solution. Finally, we show performance improvement of 3-140x in PE over commercially available Intel micro-architectures, ClearSpeed CSX700, FPGA, and Nvidia GPGPUs.
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