FFT on XMT: Case Study of a Bandwidth-Intensive Regular Algorithm on a Highly-Parallel Many Core
James Edwards, Uzi Vishkin · 2016
FFT has been a classic computation engine for numerous applications. The bandwidth-intensive nature of FFT capped its performance on off-the-shelf parallel machines that are bandwidth-limited, and forced application researchers into seeking easier-to-speedup alternatives to FFT, even when inferior to FFT. But, what if effective support of FFT is feasible? Using FFT as an example, we examine the impact that adoption of some enabling technologies, including silicon photonics, would have on the performance of a many-core architecture. The results show that a single-chip many-core processor could potentially outperform a large high-performance computing cluster.