Towards efficient and concurrent FFTs implementation on Intel Xeon/MIC clusters for LTE and HPC
Mounir Khelifi, Daniel Massicotte, Yvon Savaria · 2016
Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) is an important part of many applications, such as in wireless communication based on OFDM (Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing). With Cloud Radio Access Networks, implementing FFTs on multiprocessor clusters is a challenging task. For instance, supporting the Long Term Evolution (LTE) protocol requires processing 100 independent FFTs (with sizes ranging from 128 to 2048 points) in 66.7 μs. In this work, seven native FFT candidate implementations are compared. The considered implementation environments are: OpenMP (Open Multi-Processing) on 1 core, MPI (Message Passing Interface) on 1 core, 2 cores, and 3 cores, Hybrid OpenMP+MPI on 1 core and 3 cores, and MPI on an heterogeneous platform composed of Xeon-Phi and 3 cores. The reported experimental results show that the latter method meets the latency requirements of LTE. It is shown that the OpenMP and MPI paradigms running only on MICs (Many Integrated Cores) cannot benefit fully from the computing capability of many-core architectures. The heterogeneous combination of Xeon+MICs provides a better performance.