Acceleration of Full-PIC Simulation on a CPU-FPGA Tightly Coupled Environment
Ryotaro Sakai, Naru Sugimoto, Takaaki Miyajima, Naoyuki Fujita, Hideharu Amano · 2016
Hall thruster is a sort of electric propulsion and has been studied in many research institutes. In the design process of Hall thruster, a numerical simulation called Full-PIC (Particle-In-Cell) method is used. Although this simulation provides high accurate result, it is known as a very time consuming job. In this paper, we present a study of acceleration of Full-PIC simulation on a CPU-FPGA tightly coupled environment. A high-load part is selected and off-loaded to an FPGA. Zynq-7000 and Vivado HLS are used for implementation. To optimize the implemented design, every target process was divided into some parts for pipelining and adjustment interval. Three off-loaded subroutines named "field_source", "particle_att_ion" and "particle_att_ele" achieved 8.53 times, 12.78 times and 14.95 times performance compared with the software execution, respectively. The total execution time of target part is sped up 5.17 times compared with Cortex-A9 667MHz in Zynq.